A performance study of robust load sharing strategies fordistributed heterogeneous Web server systems

Replication of information across multiple servers is becoming a common approach to support popular Web sites. A distributed architecture with some mechanisms to assign client requests to Web servers is more scalable than any centralized or mirrored architecture. In this paper, we consider distributed systems in which the Authoritative Domain Name Server (ADNS) of the Web site takes the request dispatcher role by mapping the URL hostname into the IP address of a visible node, that is, a Web server or a Web cluster interface. This architecture can support local and geographical distribution of the Web servers. However, the ADNS controls only a very small fraction of the requests reaching the Web site because the address mapping is not requested for each client access. Indeed, to reduce Internet traffic, address resolution is cached at various name servers for a time-to-live (TTL) period. This opens an entirely new set of problems that traditional centralized schedulers of parallel/distributed systems do not have to face. The heterogeneity assumption on Web node capacity, which is much more likely in practice, increases the order of complexity of the request assignment problem and severely affects the applicability and performance of the existing load sharing algorithms. We propose new assignment strategies, namely adaptive TTL schemes, which tailor the TTL value for each address mapping instead of using a fixed value for all mapping requests. The adaptive TTL schemes are able to address both the nonuniformity of client requests and the heterogeneous capacity of Web server nodes. Extensive simulations show that the proposed algorithms are very effective in avoiding node overload, even for high levels of heterogeneity and limited ADNS control     

An SSL Back-End Forwarding Scheme in Cluster-Based Web Servers

State-of-the-art cluster-based data centers consisting of three tiers (Web server, application server, and database server) are being used to host complex Web services such as e-commerce applications. The application server handles dynamic and sensitive Web contents that need protection from eavesdropping, tampering, and forgery. Although the secure sockets layer (SSL) is the most popular protocol to provide a secure channel between a client and a cluster-based network server, its high overhead degrades the server performance considerably and, thus, affects the server scalability. Therefore, improving the performance of SSL-enabled network servers is critical for designing scalable and high-performance data centers. In this paper, we examine the impact of SSL offering and SSL-session-aware distribution in cluster-based network servers. We propose a back-end forwarding scheme, called ssl_with_bf, that employs a low-overhead user-level communication mechanism like virtual interface architecture (VIA) to achieve a good load balance among server nodes. We compare three distribution models for network servers, round robin (RR), ssl_with_session, and ssl_with_bf, through simulation. The experimental results with 16-node and 32-node cluster configurations show that, although the session reuse of ssl_with_session is critical to improve the performance of application servers, the proposed back-end forwarding scheme can further enhance the performance due to better load balancing. The ssl_with_bf scheme can minimize the average latency by about 40 percent and improve throughput across a variety of workloads.     

集群服务器在混合请求下的负载均衡优化算法

针对Web集群服务器在处理分配混合页面访问任务时开环负载均衡算法导致局部服务器负载偏高而降低系统效率的问题,建立了一类基于动态调节的闭环负载分配策略。根据服务器处理Web访问页面类型的特点,建立静态页面与动态页面混合处理的负载量模型,形成处理不同服务请求与负载均衡的内在动态映射关系,以此优化静态页面缓存与调用方式,并基于服务器负载率动态预测和均衡指标,采用负载率偏差最小的任务权重最优分配模型,确定服务器集群的最优任务权重,实现了服务器集群处理混合页面访问的负载均衡分配策略和算法。仿真结果验证了负载均衡算法的正确性和有效性,可以达到更好的负载均衡效果。     

一种异构Web服务器集群动态负载均衡算法

针对Web服务器集群系统中负载动态变化特性,提出了一种临界加速递减动态请求负载分配算法．通过负载权值的等效变换更准确地反映集群中单台服务器的当前负载状态;通过临界递减因子来有效抑制服务器可能出现的“拒绝访问”现象;通过随机概率分配方式替代固定转发分配方式,使访问负载的分布更均匀;通过实际测试获取算法中所需的计算参数,使配置操作更为简单．实验结果表明,该算法对较大负载的文件集的大密度访问情况效果明显。     

Weblins: A scalable WWW cluster-based server

With the ever-growing web traffic, cluster-based web servers have become very important to the Internet infrastructure. Thus, making the best use of all available resources in the cluster to achieve high performance is a significant research issue. In this paper, we present Weblins, a cluster-based web server that can achieve good throughput. Weblins has Gobelins operating system as platform. Gobelins is an efficient single system image operating system that transparently makes use of the resources available in the cluster. The architecture of Weblins is fully distributed. Weblins implements a content-aware request distribution policy via a new interface on top of Gobelins. Popular web files are dynamically replicated on all nodes via a cooperative caching mechanism. For the non-popular files, the requests are handed-off to the corresponding nodes via the TCP Handoff protocol. Simulation results show that the strategy used by Weblins is more suitable for cluster-based Web severs in comparison with pure content-aware strategy and pure cooperative caching strategy.     

一种基于预取的集群服务器调度算法

针对集群服务器LARD调度算法只能利用已有缓存的问题，提出一种基于预取的算法Prefetch-LARD,该算法从Web访问日志中挖掘页面之间的转移概率，建立马尔科夫链模型，在调度请求时利用概率关系提前将下一次可能访问的文档从节点磁盘取到本地cache中，提高了请求的缓存命中率；算法还采用了加权的节点超载判断方法，以提高集群节点的负载均衡度，实验表明，在同样的测试环境下，Prefetch-LARD算法比LARD算法的缓存命中率提高26．9％，系统的吞吐量相应提高18．8％．     

基于请求类型的数字图书馆负载平衡模型

对于具有海量信息的数字图书馆,文章针对不同请求服务时间变化大的特性,提出基于请求类型的负载平衡模型,该模型根据各种不同请求对服务器负载状况的影响并结合各服务器的性能进行动态负载调度。避免占用服务器资源较多的请求同时分配到同一台服务器上。仿真结果表明该模型具有良好的负载平衡效果。有效地缩短了用户请求的响应时间。     

一种基于网络地址转换的负载均衡算法

本文探讨集群服务器使用的负载均衡技术及负载分配的策略,并将网络地址转换应用于VOD集群,将负载分给多个服务器分担,以解决VOD集群服务器面临的大量并发访问造成的CPU或I/O的高负载问题。为了达到最佳的负载均衡效果,负载均衡器需要根据各个服务器的当前CPU和I/O状态来分配负载,这就需要动态监视服务器的负载,并应用优化的负载分配策略,达到平均分配负载的目的。     

High-Performance Resource Allocation and Request Redirection Algorithms for Web Clusters

With increasing richness in features such as personalization of content, Web applications are becoming increasingly complex and hence compute intensive. Traditional approaches for improving performance of static content Web sites have been based on the assumption that static content such as images are network intensive. However, these methods are not applicable to the dynamic content applications which are more compute intensive than static content. This paper proposes a suite of algorithms which jointly optimize the performance of dynamic content applications by reducing the client access times while also minimizing the resource utilization. A server migration algorithm allocates servers on-demand within a cluster such that the client access times are not affected even under sudden overload conditions. Further, a server selection mechanism enables statistical multiplexing of resources across clusters by redirecting requests away from overloaded clusters. We also propose a cluster decision algorithm which decides whether to migrate in additional servers at the local cluster or redirect requests remotely under different workload conditions. Through a combination of analytical modeling, trace-driven simulation over traces from large e-commerce sites and testbed implementation, we explore the performance savings achieved by the proposed algorithms.     

Keta中的Socket复用技术

随着信息技术的不断发展,提高Web服务器的性能是个亟待解决的问题。内核级Web Server的实现有效地提高了Web服务器的处理能力。然而,目前的内核级Web服务器通常只处理静态请求,而动态请求需要转发到外部传统Web服务器上进行处理。本文针对一种内核级非对称多线程流水线服务器——Keta,研究并改进了动态请求的转发机制,提出了利用Socket复用技术来实现转发的策略,有效地提高了该服务器的效率。     

Analysis of task assignment policies in scalable distributedweb-server systems

A distributed multiserver Web site can provide the scalability necessary to keep up with growing client demand at popular sites. Load balancing of these distributed Web-server systems, consisting of multiple, homogeneous Web servers for document retrieval and a Domain Name Server (DNS) for address resolution, opens interesting new problems. In this paper, we investigate the effects of using a more active DNS which, as an atypical centralized scheduler, applies some scheduling strategy in routing the requests to the most suitable Web server. Unlike traditional parallel/distributed systems in which a centralized scheduler has full control of the system, the DNS controls only a very small fraction of the requests reaching the multiserver Web site. This peculiarity, especially in the presence of highly skewed load, makes it very difficult to achieve acceptable load balancing and avoid overloading some Web servers. This paper adapts traditional scheduling algorithms to the DNS, proposes new policies, and examines their impact under different scenarios. Extensive simulation results show the advantage of strategies that make scheduling decisions on the basis of the domain that originates the client requests and limited server state information (e.g., whether a server is overloaded or not). An initially unexpected result is that using detailed server information, especially based on history, does not seem useful in predicting the future load and can often lead to degraded performance     

Web content adaptation to improve server overload behavior

This paper presents a study of Web content adaptation to improve server overload performance, as well as an implementation of a Web content adaptation software prototype. When the request rate on a Web server increases beyond server capacity, the server becomes overloaded and unresponsive. The TCP listen queue of the server's socket overflows exhibiting a drop-tail behavior. As a result, clients experience service outages. Since clients typically issue multiple requests over the duration of a session with the server, and since requests are dropped indiscriminately, all clients connecting to the server at overload are likely to experience connection failures, even though there may be enough capacity on the server to deliver all responses properly for a subset of clients. In this paper, we propose to resolve the overload problem by adapting delivered content to load conditions to alleviate overload. The premise is that successful delivery of a less resource intensive content under overload is more desirable to clients than connection rejection or failures.The paper suggests the feasibility of content adaptation from three different viewpoints; (a) potential for automating content adaptation with minimal involvement of the content provider, (b) ability to achieve sufficient savings in resource requirements by adapting present-day Web content while preserving adequate information, and (c) feasibility to apply content adaptation technology on the Web with no modification to existing Web servers, browsers or the HTTP protocol.     

Coscheduled distributed-Web servers on system area network

As cluster-based Web servers are increasingly adopted to host a variety of network-based services, improving the performance of such servers has become critical to satisfy the customers’ demands. Especially, the user response time is an important factor so that clients feel satisfied with the Web services. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of minimizing the response time of a server by exploiting the advantages of both user-level communication and coscheduling. We, thus, propose a coscheduled server model based on the recently proposed distributed PRESS Web server, where the remote cache accesses can be coscheduled on different nodes to reduce the response time. We experiment this concept using two known coscheduling techniques, called dynamic coscheduling (DCS) and DCS with immediate blocking. We have developed a comprehensive simulation testbed that captures the underlying communication layer in a cluster, the characteristics of various coscheduling algorithms, and the characteristics of the distributed server model to estimate the average delay and throughput with different system configurations. The accuracy of the VIA communication layer and the DCS mechanism is verified using measurements on a 16-node Linux cluster. Extensive simulation of four server models (PRESS over VIA, coscheduled PRESS model with DCS, with DCS and blocking, and Adaptive) using 32-node cluster configurations indicates that the average response time of a distributed server can be minimized significantly by coscheduling the communicating processes. The use of the DCS scheme reduced the average latency up to four times to the PRESS over VIA model that uses only user-level communication.     

An approximation-based load-balancing algorithm with admission control for cluster web servers with dynamic workloads

The growth of web-based applications in business and e-commerce is building up demands for high performance web servers for better throughputs and lower user-perceived latency. These demands are leading to a widespread substitution of powerful single servers by robust newcomers, cluster web servers, in many enterprise companies. In this respect the load-balancing algorithms play an important role in boosting the performance of cluster servers. The previous load-balancing algorithms which were designed for the handling of static contents in web services suffer from significant performance degradation under dynamic and database-driven workloads. Regarding this, we propose an approximation-based load-balancing algorithm with admission control for cluster-based web servers in this study. Since it is difficult to accurately determine the loads of web servers through feedbacks from distributed agents in web servers, we propose an analytical model of a web server to estimate the web servers’ loads. To achieve this, the algorithm classifies requests based on their service times and track numbers of outstanding requests for each class of each web server node and also based on their resource demands to dynamically estimate the loads of each node. For the error handling of the model a proportional integral (PI) controller from control theory is used. Then the estimated available capacity of each web server is used for load balancing and admission control decisions. The implementation results with a standard benchmark confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, which improves both the mean response time and the throughput of the cluster compared to rival load-balancing algorithms, and also avoids situations in which the cluster is overloaded, even when the request rates are beyond the cluster capacity.     

影响多媒体服务器性能的关键因素研究

在构建大规模视频服务系统时 ,基于层次型多服务器群的体系结构在吞吐率、可扩展性、经济性等方面都有其突出的优势 ,尤其适合于在因特网上的应用 .但是 ,要充分发挥和提高视频服务系统的性能 ,还要针对一些主要的瓶颈(如服务器磁盘 I/ O带宽与网络带宽 ) ,解决好一系列的问题 .本文分析了影响多媒体视频服务器性能的一些主要因素 ,如视频服务器的体系结构、服务器与客户端之间的数据传送方式、媒体数据在视频服务器存储子系统中的分布与放置方式、对磁盘访问请求的调度、单服务器中的缓存及多服务器间协同缓存的管理、接入控制策略、流调度策略等 ,这些因素对视频服务器的性能与吞吐率有着极大的影响 .本文还介绍了一些适用于大规模视频服务系统的性能优化技术 ,如广播、批处理等流调度策略 .在构建视频服务器系统时 ,只有综合考虑这些因素 ,才能真正提高服务器乃至整个视频服务系统的吞吐率 ,并较好地满足客户的 Qo S要求     

Optimal server allocations for streaming multimedia applications on the Internet

In this paper, we address the server selection problem for streaming applications on the Internet. The architecture we consider is similar to the content distribution networks consisting of geographically dispersed servers and user populations over an interconnected set of metropolitan areas. Server selection issues for Web-based applications in such an environment have been widely addressed; the selection is mostly based on proximity measured using packet delay. Such a greedy or heuristic approach to server selection will not address the capacity planning problem evident in multimedia applications. For such applications, admission control becomes an essential part of their design to maintain Quality of Service (QoS). Our objective in providing a solution to the server selection problem is threefold: first, to direct clients to the nearest server; second, to provide multiple sources to diffuse network load; third, to match server capacity to user demand so that optimal blocking performance can be expected. We accomplish all three objectives by using a special type of Linear Programming (LP) formulation called the Transportation Problem (TP). The objective function in the TP is to minimize the cost of serving a video request from user population x using server y as measured by network distance. The optimal allocation between servers and user populations from TP results in server clusters, the aggregated capacity of each cluster designed to meet the demands of its designated user population. Within a server cluster, we propose streaming protocols for request handling that will result in a balanced load. We implement threshold-based admission control in individual servers within a cluster to enforce the fair share of the server resource to its designated user population. The blocking performance is used as a trigger to find new optimal allocations when blocking rates become unacceptable due to change in user demands. We substantiate the analytical model with an extensive simulation for analyzing the performance of the proposed clustered architecture and the protocols. The simulation results show significant difference in overall blocking performance between optimal and suboptimal allocations in as much as 15% at moderate to high workloads. We also show that the proposed cluster protocols result in lower packet loss and latencies by forcing path diversity from multiple sources for request delivery.     

WWW集群服务器的数据副本分布方式研究

为了有效地提高WWW服务器的吞吐能力、反应速度和可扩展性,国际上许多著名站点纷纷转向采用WWW集群服务器来替代原有的单一主机服务器.采用不同副本分布方式的WWW集群服务器,其数据可靠性也有所不同.对不同数据副本分布方式进行探讨,同时,论证了最优副本分布方案.     

Web集群服务器中分发静态请求的调度算法*

为分发静态请求提出一种自适应的基于文档大小的调度算法ADSB,它使用资源占用时间来衡量负载,并根据被请求文档的大小来分发请求,均衡各个后台服务器的负载;ADSB根据负载历史周期地预测即将到来的负载统计特性,并根据预测结果来调整算法的参数;由于有着目标位置特性,ADSB能获得很高的缓存命中率;因为实际静态文档的大小服从重尾分布,所以分发大小不同的文档到不同的服务器,使ADSB减小了小文档的平均响应时间,同时大文档也没受到明显的影响。实验表明,ADSB的性能优于已有的经典的调度算法。     

应用层洪泛攻击的异常检测

从近年的发展趋势看, 分布式拒绝服务攻击已经从原来的低层逐渐向应用层发展, 它比传统的攻击更加有效且更具隐蔽性. 为检测利用合法应用层HTTP请求发动的洪泛攻击, 本文把应用层洪泛攻击视为一种异常的用户访问行为, 从用户浏览行为的角度实现攻击检测. 基于实际网络流的试验表明,该模型可以有效测量Web用户的访问行为正常度并实现应用层的DDoS洪泛攻击检测.     

A Network Processor-Based, Content-Aware Switch

A content-aware switch can optimize cluster-based server architectures by examining requests and distributing them to servers on the basis of application-level information. A network-processor-based switch can reduce HTTP processing latency and improve packet throughput.