Local Buffer Synchronization

The table buffers reside locally on each application server of the system. However, this makes it necessary for the buffer administration to transfer all changes made to buffered objects to all the application servers of the system.

If a buffered table is modified, it is updated synchronously in the buffer of the application server from which the change was made. The buffer synchronization for the whole network, that is, the synchronization of the buffers of all the other application servers, is carried out using an asynchronous procedure.

Entries are written in a central database table (DDLOG) after each table modification that could be buffered. Each application server reads these entries at fixed time intervals.

If entries are found that show a change to the data buffered by this server, this data is invalidated. If this data is accessed again, it is read directly from the database. In such an access, the table can then be loaded to the buffer again.

To prevent a table being constantly loaded to the buffer and then immediately invalidated there, the table can only be loaded again to the buffer after a waiting time following invalidation.

The advantage of this method over a synchronous method (where the network immediately reports each change to buffered data of one server to all the other servers) is that the load on the network is kept to a minimum.

The disadvantage of this method as compared with synchronous updating is that the data will not be up-to-date during the time interval between two synchronizations. For this reason, only tables which have frequent read accesses and infrequent write accesses should be buffered.

Important customer data may only be buffered in cases where only read accesses are made. Only tables in which not all application servers need always access the most up-to-date data should be buffered.

The default setting is for buffer synchronization to be activated in the system profile. Buffer synchronization is not required in central systems with only one application server and should be switched off.

See also:

Example for Buffer Synchronization