Using mini-flash crowds to infer resource constraints in remote web servers

Abstract

Unexpected surges in request traffic (e.g., flash crowds) can exercise server-side resources such as access bandwidth, CPU, and disks in unanticipated ways. Administrators today do not have the requisite tools to fully understand the effect that flash crowds can have on server-side resources. As a result, most Web-servers today rely on significant over-provisioning, strict admission control, or alternatively use potentially expensive solutions like CDNs to provide high availability under load. A more fine-grained understanding of the performance of servers under emulated but controlled flash crowd like conditions can guide administrators to make more efficient provisioning and resource management decisions. We present the initial design of Mini-Flash Crowds (MFC). a light-weight wide-area profiling service that reveals resource bottlenecks in aWeb-server infrastructure, including access bandwidth, processing resources, and back-end data management. The MFC approach is based on a set of controlled measurements in which an increasing number of distributed clients make synchronized requests to exercise specific resources of a remote server. Using a number of wide-area experiments and controlled lab tests, we show that our approach can faithfully track the impact of request loads on different server resources. Our approach is non-intrusive and thus we can use it to actively probe numerous live Web servers. We present the results from a preliminary measurement study of resource provisioning on public Web servers. Copyright 2007 INM'07.