Previous papers have postulated that traditional schemes for the management of replicated data are doomed to failure in practice due to a quartic (or worse) explosion in the probability of deadlocks.  In this paper, we present results of a simulation study for three recently introduced protocols that guarantee global serializability and transaction atomicity without resorting to the two-phase commit protocol.  The protocols analyzed in this paper include a global locking protocol (by Gray, et al., Sigmod97), a ``pessimistic'' protocol based on a replication graph (by Breitbart and Korth, PODS97), and an ``optimistic'' protocol based on a replication graph. The results of the study show a wide range of practical applicability for the lazy replica-update approach employed in these protocols. We show that under reasonable contention conditions and sufficiently high transaction rate, both replication-graph-based protocols outperform the global locking protocol. The distinctions among the protocols in terms of performance are significant.  For example, an offered load where 70% - 80% of transactions under the global locking protocol were aborted, only 10% of transactions were aborted under the protocols based on the replication graph.  The results of the study suggest that protocols based on a replication graph offer practical techniques for replica management. However, it also shows that performance deteriorates rapidly and dramatically when transaction throughput reaches a saturation point.