Potential for multiplexing gain

With the movement toward hosted game services [28,29] as well as on-demand computing infrastructure for games such as Butterfly.net [30], there has been a great deal of interest in reducing the cost of running game servers by sharing server resources dynamically across multiple games and applications. We explore two likely scenarios: hosting multiple games on the same servers, and hosting web sites along with game servers. In addition, we study the usage behavior of a content-distribution network for supporting games. Our results show that there are significant challenges in multiplexing interactive applications on the same server infrastructure and that only limited opportunities for reducing peak resource usage exist.