Experimental evaluation of horizontal and vertical scalability of cluster-based application servers for transactional workloads
Daniel Fernando Garcia, Rodrigo García, Joaquín Entrialgo, Javier García, Manuel García · 2008
Abstract: The scalability of the application servers is an essential issue to guarantee the quality of the services provided by any company that sell its products and services through Internet in business-to-business (B2B) environments. This paper deals with the selection of a proper transactional load to evaluate the scalability, in order to obtain representative results that can provide useful insights for a large range of transactional applications. This evaluation work compares the scalability and other related performance metrics when an application server cluster is scaled horizontally, adding new servers, and when it is scaled vertically, adding cores into the servers. Multiple issues related with the proper experimental design to carry out an evaluation work of these characteristics are also presented in this paper. Finally, it is important to remark that there are few works in the literature concerning the scalability evaluation of transactional systems, in spite of the critical importance of the scalability in this kind of systems. Key-Words: Cluster scalability, Horizontal scalability, Vertical scalability, Transactional benchmarks, TPC-App