Abstract
Web servers often experience overload situations due to the extremely bursty nature of Internet traffic, popular online events or malicious attacks. Such overload situations significantly affect performance and may result in lost revenue as reported by the recent denial of service attacks. Overload control schemes are well researched and understood in telecommunication systems. However, their use in web servers is currently very limited. Our focus in this paper is to propose effective overload control mechanisms for web servers. An important aspect in overload control is to minimize the work spent on a request which is eventually not serviced due to overload. This paper studies three simple schemes for controlling the load effectively. The first scheme selectively drops incoming requests as they arrive at the server using an intelligent network interface card (NIC). The second scheme provides feedback to a previous node (proxy server or ultimate client) to allow a gapping control that reduces offered load under overload. The third scheme is simply a combination of the two. The experimental results show that even these simple schemes are effective in improving the throughput of the web server by 40% and response time by 70% under heavy overloads, as compared with the case without any overload control.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
G. Banga, P. Druschel, and J.C. Mogul, “Better Operating System features for faster network servers,” Proc. of workshop on internet server performance (WISP), June 1998.
K. Kant and Y. Won, “Server capacity planning for web traffic workload”, IEEE transactions on data and knowledge Engineering, Oct 1999, pp731–747.
K. Kant, “On Aggregate Traffic Generation with Multifractal Properties”, Proceedings of GLOBECOM 2000, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
K. Kant and M. Venakatachalam, “Modeling traffic non-stationarity in e-commerce servers, working paper, Sept 2000, Available at kkant.ccwebhost.com
K. Kant, Introduction to Computer System Performance Modeling, McGraw Hill, 1992.
S. Kent and R. Atkinson, “Security Architecture for the Internet Protocol,” RFC 2401, Nov 1998.
K. Kant, R. Iyer, and P. Mohapatra, “Architectural Impact of Secure Socket Layer on Internet Servers”, to appear in International conference on computer design (ICCD), Sept 2000.
K. Kant, “Performance of Internal Overload Controls in Large Switches”, 28th Annual Simulation Conference, Phoenix, AZ, April 1995, pp 228–237.
K. Kant, “A Unified Global Congestion Control Scheme for Broadband Signaling Networks”, unpublished report. Available at kkant.ccwebhost.com
D.R. Manfield, G. Millsteed, and M. Zukerman, “Congestion Controls in SS7 Signalling Networks”, IEEE Communications Magazine, June 1993, pp 50–57.
B. Northcote and M. Rumsewicz, “An investigation of CCS Tandem Overload Control Issues,” Proceedings of GLOBECOM, Nov 1995, Singapore, pp718.
M.P. Rumsewicz and D.E. Smith, “A Comparison of SS7 Congestion Control Options During Mass Call-in Situations”, IEEE Trans, on Networking, Vol 3, No 1, Feb 1995.
M. Rumsewicz, M. Castro, and M.T. Le, “Eddie Admission Control Scheme: Algorithm description, prototypt design details and capacity benchmarking”, available at www. eddievare. org
M. Rumsewicz, “Load balancing and control algorithm for a single site Web server”, available at www. eddieware. org
A. Feldmann, A.C. Gilbert and W. Willinger, “Data Networks as Cascades: Investigating the multifractal nature of Internet WAN traffic”, Proc. 1998 ACM SIGCOMM, pp42–55.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 Springer-Verlag London Limited
About this paper
Cite this paper
Iyer, R., Tewari, V., Kant, K. (2001). Overload Control Mechanisms for Web Servers. In: Goto, K., Hasegawa, T., Takagi, H., Takahashi, Y. (eds) Performance and QoS of Next Generation Networking. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0705-7_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0705-7_13
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-1183-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-0705-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive