Application-level Differentiated Services for Web Servers

Lars Eggert and John Heidemann
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

The current World-Wide 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 web prefetching or multiple priority schemes, different levels of service are desirable. This paper presents three simple, server-side, application-level mechanisms (limiting process pool size, lowering process priorities, limiting transmission rate) to provide two different levels of web service (regular and low priority). We evaluated the performance of these mechanisms under combinations of two foreground workloads (light and heavy) and two levels of available network bandwidth (10Mb/s and 100Mb/s). Our experiments show that even with background traffic sufficient to saturate the network, foreground performance is reduced by at most 4-17%. Thus, our user-level mechanisms can effectively provide different service classes even in the absence of operating system and network support

Availability

Paper copies can be obtained through the WWWJ. A version of this paper is also electronically available as a technical report. Copyright terms for this paper appear below.

Reference

Eggert99a

Lars Eggert and John Heidemann. Application-level Differentiated Services for Web Servers. World-Wide Web Journal, 2 (3 ), pp. 133-142, August, 1999. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Eggert99a.html>.

@article{Eggert99a,
	author = "Lars Eggert and John Heidemann",
	title = "Application-level Differentiated Services for
                         Web Servers",
	journal = "World-Wide Web Journal",
	year = "1999",
	volume = "2",
	number = "3",
	pages = "133--142",
	month = "August",
	keywords = "web traffic, background traffic",
	availability = "
Paper copies can be obtained through the WWWJ.
A version of this paper is also electronically available as
a technical report.
",
	organization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
	copyrightholder = "author",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Eggert99a.html",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 1999 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted.

To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.