Title
Workload propagation - overload in bursty servers
Abstract
Internet servers are developing into complex but central components in the information infrastructure and are accessed by an ever-increasing and diversified user population. As such, they are susceptible to unpredicted and transient overloads, making highly available, yet cost-effective service a critical challenge. System responsiveness during overload periods is at least as important as system behavior under average, steady state load. Using measurements from a 3-tier e-commerce server, we show how normal and overload conditions propagate through the system hierarchy, i. e., from the front-end server to the back-end database, focusing on CPU, memory, and I/O performance. We find that overload conditions at lower system levels occur not only when the number of users in the system increases, but also during rapid changes in the nature of the work requested by the current users. These observations advocate the development of system mechanisms at the lower levels that can detect overload and self-adapt their configuration parameters in order to ensure high service availability and graceful performance degradation. We illustrate the effectiveness of a scheduling mechanism at the disk and provide a proof of concept that such self-adaptive scheduling mechanisms at the lower levels are a step toward faster system recovery under conditions of transient overload, and can thus complement admission control at the front end.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1109/QEST.2005.43
QEST
Keywords
Field
DocType
processor scheduling,system hierarchy,internet server,system behavior,bursty server,faster system recovery,i/o performance,unpredicted overload,workload characterization,information infrastructure,overload condition,tpc-w.,admission control,configuration parameter,lower level,resource allocation,system responsiveness,system mechanism,system recovery,back-end database,file servers,workload propagation,internet,system increase,memory performance,multi-tiered systems,3-tier e-commerce server,lower system level,overload conditions,bursty servers,self-adaptive scheduling,transient overload,front-end server,cost effectiveness,front end,e commerce,proof of concept,steady state
Population,File server,Admission control,Scheduling (computing),Workload,Computer science,Server,Computer network,Proof of concept,Resource allocation,Distributed computing
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
0-7695-2427-3
5
0.54
References 
Authors
16
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qi Zhang141422.77
Alma Riska268348.63
Erik Riedel31037142.99