The Grid Information Service (GIS) is one of the Grid Common Services which make up the basic functions belonging to Grids. This service offers a resource discovery mechanism, of which an implementation is provided by the Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS-2) which is part of the Globus Toolkit r . Grid applications are typically the users of this resource discovery mechanism; knowledge is thus obtained about the existence of appropriate resources on which to execute jobs. Since these Grid

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... plications are likely to be influenced by dynamic middleware, it is crucial that they experience a reliable performance for the proper utilisation of resources and for accountability purposes. Consequently, the approach taken in this paper is to investigate and evaluate a level of performance obtainable from the MDS. A better understanding of the performance of the GRIS (Grid Resource Information Service) and subsequently the GIIS (Grid Index Information Service), leads to a more standard way of formalising the performance of a Grid Information Service. This is achieved by defining a number of performance metrics which are analysed against a set of different information gathering methods and GRIS back-end implementations.