We find that in our environment, which we believe to be representative of distributed systems today and in the near future, the consistency model has a much higher impact on overall performance than the choice of whether to allow concurrent writers. The multiple writer protocol performs an average of 90etter than the single writer LRC protocol, but 340etter than the single-writer sequentially consistent protocol. Set against this, MW-LRC required an average of 72% memory overhead, compared to 100verhead for the single-writer protocols.