Empirical Characterization of Session–Based Workload and Reliability for Web Servers

The growing availability of Internet access has led to significant increase in the use of World Wide Web. If we are to design dependable Web–based systems that deal effectively with the increasing number of clients and highly variable workload, it is important to be able to describe the Web workload and errors accurately. In this paper we focus on the detailed empirical analysis of the session–based workload and reliability based on the data extracted from actual Web logs of eleven Web servers. First, we introduce and rigourously analyze several intra–session and inter–session metrics that collectively describe Web workload in terms of user sessions. Then, we analyze Web error characteristics and estimate the request–based and session–based reliability of Web servers. Finally, we identify the invariants of the Web workload and reliability that apply through all data sets considered. The results presented in this paper show that session–based workload and reliability are better indicators of the users perception of the Web quality than the request–based metrics.     

Analyzing factors that influence end-to-end Web performance

Web performance impacts the popularity of a particular Web site or service as well as the load on the network, but there have been no publicly available end-to-end measurements that have focused on a large number of popular Web servers examining the components of delay or the effectiveness of the recent changes to the HTTP protocol. In this paper we report on an extensive study carried out from many client sites geographically distributed around the world to a collection of over 700 servers to which a majority of Web traffic is directed. Our results show that the HTTP/1.1 protocol, particularly with pipelining, is indeed an improvement over existing practice, but that servers serving a small number of objects or closing a persistent connection without explicit notification can reduce or eliminate any performance improvement. Similarly, use of caching and multi-server content distribution can also improve performance if done effectively.     

A Web-Based Knowledge Network for Supporting Emerging Internet Applications

Although the Internet and the World Wide Web technologies have gained a tremendous amount of popularity among people and organizations, the network that these technologies created is not much more than a multimedia data network. It provides tools and services for people to browse and search for data but does not provide the facilities for automatically delivering the relevant information for supporting decision–making to the right people or applications at the right time. Nor does it provide the means for users to enter and share their knowledge that would be useful for making the right decisions. In this work, we introduce the concept of a Web–based knowledge network, which allows users and organizations to publish, not only their multimedia data, but also their knowledge in terms of events, parameterized event filters, customizable rules and triggers that are associated with their data and application systems. Operations on the data and application systems may post events over the Internet to trigger the processing of rules defined by both information providers and consumers. The knowledge network is constructed by a number of replicable software components, which can be installed at various network sites. They, together with the existing Web servers, form a network of knowledge Web servers.     

Content delivery networks: status and trends

CDNs improve network performance and offer fast and reliable applications and services by distributing content to cache servers located close to users. The Web's growth has transformed communications and business services such that speed, accuracy, and availability of network-delivered content has become absolutely critical - both on their own terms and in terms of measuring Web performance. Proxy servers partially address the need for rapid content delivery by providing multiple clients with a shared cache location. In this context, if a requested object exists in a cache (and the cached version has not expired), clients get a cached copy, which typically reduces delivery time. CDNs act as trusted overlay networks that offer high-performance delivery of common Web objects, static data, and rich multimedia content by distributing content load among servers that are close to the clients. CDN benefits include reduced origin server load, reduced latency for end users, and increased throughput. CDNs can also improve Web scalability and disperse flash-crowd events. Here we offer an overview of the CDN architecture and popular CDN service providers.     

Lightweight and Informative Traffic Metrics for Data Center Monitoring

In recent years, thousands of commodity servers have been deployed in Internet data centers to run large scale Internet applications or cloud computing services. Given the sheer volume of data communications between servers and millions of end users, it becomes a daunting task to continuously monitor the availability, performance and security of data centers in real-time operational environments. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a lightweight and informative traffic metric, streaming frequency, for network monitoring in Internet data centers. The power-series based metric that is extracted from the aggregated IP traffic streams, not only carries temporal characteristics of data center servers, but also helps uncover traffic patterns of these servers. We show the convergence and reconstructability properties of this metric through theoretical proof and algorithm analysis. Using real data-sets collected from multiple data centers of a large Internet content provider, we demonstrate its applications in detecting unwanted traffic towards data center servers. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to introduce a streaming metric with a unique reconstruction capability that could aid data center operators in network management and security monitoring.     

基于内容识别的Web集群负载均衡算法的研究

可扩展Web服务器集群是目前高性能网络服务器的主要架构方法,负载均衡技术是集群系统中任务分配的核心环节.提出了一种基于内容识别的负载均衡算法,引入了访问量阈值的概念,并通过动态的修正访问量阈值以适应网络负载的变化;利用动态反馈机制来获取服务器的负载状态,同时通过保证负载的局部性,减少相同内容在多个服务器中的重复缓存,提高服务器Cache的命中率.     

A neural network proxy cache replacement strategy and its implementation in the Squid proxy server

As the Internet has become a more central aspect for information technology, so have concerns with supplying enough bandwidth and serving web requests to end users in an appropriate time frame. Web caching was introduced in the 1990s to help decrease network traffic, lessen user perceived lag, and reduce loads on origin servers by storing copies of web objects on servers closer to end users as opposed to forwarding all requests to the origin servers. Since web caches have limited space, web caches must effectively decide which objects are worth caching or replacing for other objects. This problem is known as cache replacement. We used neural networks to solve this problem and proposed the Neural Network Proxy Cache Replacement (NNPCR) method. The goal of this research is to implement NNPCR in a real environment like Squid proxy server. In order to do so, we propose an improved strategy of NNPCR referred to as NNPCR-2. We show how the improved model can be trained with up to twelve times more data and gain a 5–10% increase in Correct Classification Ratio (CCR) than NNPCR. We implemented NNPCR-2 in Squid proxy server and compared it with four other cache replacement strategies. In this paper, we use 84 times more data than NNPCR was tested against and present exhaustive test results for NNPCR-2 with different trace files and neural network structures. Our results demonstrate that NNPCR-2 made important, balanced decisions in relation to the hit rate and byte hit rate; the two performance metrics most commonly used to measure the performance of web proxy caches.     

QCWS: an implementation of QoS-capable multimedia web services

QoS (Quality of Service), which defines service quality such as latency, availability, timeliness and reliability, is important for web applications that provide real-time information, multimedia content, or time-critical services. Many web applications are best implemented by servers with a guaranteed server processing capacity. In this research, we study the QoS control issues using the current Web services standards. We propose a QoS-capable Web service architecture, QCWS, by deploying a QoS broker between Web service clients and providers. The functions of the QoS broker module include tracking QoS information about servers, making selection decisions for clients, and negotiating with servers to get QoS agreements. We have implemented a QCWS prototype using IBM WSDK, enhanced with simple QoS capabilities. We have measured the performance running under different service priorities.     

Estimating graph distance and centrality on shared nothing architectures

We present a parallel toolkit for pairwise distance computation in massive networks. Computing the exact shortest paths between a large number of vertices is a costly operation, and serial algorithms are not practical for billion‐scale graphs. We first describe an efficient parallel method to solve the single source shortest path problem on commodity hardware with no shared memory. Using it as a building block, we introduce a new parallel algorithm to estimate the shortest paths between arbitrary pairs of vertices. Our method exploits data locality, produces highly accurate results, and allows batch computation of shortest paths with 7% average error in graphs that contain billions of edges. The proposed algorithm is up to two orders of magnitude faster than previously suggested algorithms and does not require large amounts of memory or expensive high‐end servers. We further leverage this method to estimate the closeness and betweenness centrality metrics, which involve systems challenges dealing with indexing, joining, and comparing large datasets efficiently. In one experiment, we mined a real‐world Web graph with 700 million nodes and 12 billion edges to identify the most central vertices and calculated more than 63 billion shortest paths in 6 h on a 20‐node commodity cluster. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于分散式查找的Web服务器集群

随着www用户快速增加，人们对Web服务器的需求也越来越高，集群是解决这个问题的一种重要方案。但是现有的Web服务器集群还存在自适应性差、有系统瓶颈等不足。该文在分散式查找算法Pastry的基础之上，提出，一种新的Web服务器集群方案。它具有分散式查找算法的诸多优点，如可扩展、自组织、高容错和分散特性，较好地克服了传统Web服务器集群方案的不足。     

Proxy caching that estimates page load delays

Do users wait less if proxy caches incorporate estimates of the current network conditions into document replacement algorithms? To answer this, we explore two new caching algorithms: (1) keep in the cache documents that take the longest to retrieve; and (2) use a hybrid of several factors, trying to keep in the cache documents from servers that take a long time to connect to, that must be loaded over the slowest Internet links, that have been referenced the most frequently, and that are small. The algorithms work by estimating the Web page download delays or proxy-to-Web server bandwidth using recent page fetches. The new algorithms are compared to the best three existing policies—LRU, LFU, and SIZE—using three measures-user response time and ability to minimize Web server loads and network bandwidth consumed—on workloads from Virginia Tech and Boston University.     

Web服务器中基于自适应控制的成比例延迟区分服务

Internet上Web应用日益广泛的使用,使得Web服务器需要在高负载下提供性能保证与区分服务,以满足用户的不同需求。响应延迟是评价Web服务器的一项关键性能指标,而成比例延迟区分服务是一种重要的区分服务模型。针对Apache Web服务器,提出并实现了基于自适应控制的成比例延迟区分服务。在每个采样周期,自适应控制器根据预设的延迟区分参数,通过动态计算并调节各个客户类别的服务线程数目,可保证Apache Web服务器上高优先级客户具有较低的平均连接延迟,而各个客户类别的平均延迟比保持不变。仿真结果表明,在动态变化的负载、参考输入以及不同的系统配置之下,控制器作用下的Apache Web服务器都能可靠地提供成比例延迟区分服务。     

Solving the fuzzy shortest path problem using multi-criteria decision method based on vague similarity measure

Many researchers have focused on the fuzzy shortest path problem in a network with non-deterministic information due to its importance to various applications. The goal of this paper is to select the shortest path in multi-constrained network using multi-criteria decision method based on vague similarity measure. In our approach, each arc length represents multiple metrics. The multi-constraints are equivalent to the concept of multi-criteria based on vague sets. We propose a similarity measure of vague sets in which the positive constraints and the negative constraints are defined. Furthermore, the procedures are developed to obtain the “best” and “worst” ideal paths. We evaluate similarity degrees between all candidate paths and two ideal paths with the proposed similarity measure. Through comparing the relative degrees of paths, it is shown that the path with the largest relative degree is the shortest path. Finally, we conduct two sets of numerical experiments—using Matlab to verify the feasibility and correctness of the proposed algorithm and developing a routing decision simulation system (RDSS) to demonstrate that the proposed approach is reasonable and effective.     

一种基于云计算的入侵检测系统模型

文章首先对传统的防火墙技术及其局限性做了简要分析,其次设计了基于云计算的入侵检测系统模型,并对其技术实现进行了探讨.该系统可以迅速判断并阻止已知和未知的安全问题,使之在发生之前加以拦截,展示了基于云计算架构的Web内容防护解决方案.本模型可用于进一步阻止目前快速增长且极具动态性的网络威胁,提高了网络整体的安全性能.     

A Tiered System for Serving Differentiated Content

Contemporary Web sites typically consist of front–end Web servers, application servers, and back-end information systems such as database servers. There has been limited research on how to provide overload control and service differentiation for the back-end systems. In this paper we propose an architecture called tiered service (TS) for these purposes. In TS, there are several heterogeneous back-end systems to serve the Web applications. The Web applications communicate with a routing intermediary to intelligently route the queries to the appropriate back-end servers based on various policies such as client profiles and server load. In our system the back ends may store different qualities of data; lower quality data typically requires less overhead to serve. The main contributions of this paper include (i) a tiered content replication scheme that replicates tiered qualities of data on heterogeneous back ends with different capacity to satisfy clients with diverse requirements for latency and quality of data, and (ii) an application-transparent query routing architecture that automatically routes the queries to the appropriate back ends. The architecture was implemented in our test bed, and its performance was benchmarked. The experimental results demonstrate that TS offers significant performance improvement.     

一种基于DFA的网络攻击检测算法

提出一种基于确定有限自动状态机(DFA)语法的网络攻击检测方法。正常的网络行为符合一定的语法规则,异常的行为会偏离正常的语法规则。通过对正常行为样本的学习得到基于DFA的语法,用学习得到的DFA模型检测针对网络服务器的应用层攻击。基于现实数据的对比实验表明该方法检测性能较好。     

检测使用Web反射器的攻击

攻击者在大规模DDoS网络攻击中使用反射器向受害者发送洪水包,Web服务器被攻击者利用为TCP反射器不仅加剧了网络攻击的程度,也消耗了正常Web服务资源。分析了Web反射器所在网络的入出口流量特点,以及攻击者利用Web反射器发起攻击时的数据包特性,利用流入和流出反射器网络TCP数据包的特性,通过对网络流量的异常统计检测和实时在线分析来检测Web反射器。模拟实验表明,可以检测出利用Web服务器进行的大规模DRDoS攻击。     

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.     

Connection management for QoS service on the Web

The current Web service model treats all requests equivalently, both while being processed by servers and while being transmitted over the network. For some uses, such as multiple priority schemes, different levels of service are desirable. We propose application-level TCP connection management mechanisms for Web servers to provide two different levels of Web service, high and low service, by setting different time-outs for inactive TCP connections. We evaluated the performance of the mechanism under heavy and light loading conditions on the Web server. Our experiments show that, though heavy traffic saturates the network, high level class performance is improved by as much as 25–28%. Therefore, this mechanism can effectively provide QoS guaranteed services even in the absence of operating system and network support.     

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.