Implementation of a Layer-7 Web Clustering System on Linux with Performance Enhancements via Recognition of User Request Rate Variations
Hong Il-gu, H Noh Sam · 2005
The popularity of Web service is ever increasing. As the number of services and clients continue to increase, the problem of providing a system that scales with this increase is becoming more difficult. A costly and ineffective method is to buy a new system that is more powerful every time the load becomes unbearable. h more cost effective solution is to expand the system as the need arises. This is the approach taken in Web cluster systems. However, providing effective scalability in a Web cluster system is stil1 an open issue. In this study, we implement a Web cluster system based on Layer 7 switching technique on Linux. The implementation is based on a design proposed and implemented by Aron et al., but on the FreeBSD. Though the design li the same, due to the vast difference between the FreeBSD and Linux, the implementation presented in this paper is totally new. We also propose the Dual Scheduling (DS) load distribution algorithm that distributes the requests to the system resources by observing the variations in the request rate. We show through measurement on our implementation that the DS alorithm performs considerably bettor than previous algorithms.