Integrated Resource Management for Cluster-based Internet Services
Client request rates for Internet services tend to be bursty and thus it is
important to maintain efficient resource utilization under a wide range of load
conditions. Network service clients typically seek services interactively and
maintaining reasonable response time is often imperative for such services.
In addition, providing differentiated service qualities and resource allocation
to multiple service classes can also be desirable at times. This paper
presents an integrated resource management framework (part of Neptune
system) that provides flexible service quality specification,
efficient resource utilization, and service differentiation for cluster-based
services. This framework introduces the metric of quality-aware service
yield to combine the overall system efficiency and individual service response
time in one flexible model.
Resources are managed through a two-level request distribution and scheduling
scheme. At the cluster level, a fully decentralized request distribution
architecture is employed to achieve high scalability and availability. Inside
each service node, an adaptive scheduling policy maintains efficient resource
utilization under a wide range of load conditions. Our trace-driven
evaluations demonstrate the performance, scalability, and service
differentiation achieved by the proposed techniques.
1 Introduction
Previous studies show that the client request rates for Internet services tend
to be bursty and fluctuate
dramatically [5,10,11]. For example,
the daily peak-to-average load ratio at Internet search service Ask Jeeves
(www.ask.com) is typically 3:1 and it can be much higher and
unpredictable in the presence of extraordinary events.
As another example, the online site of Encyclopedia Britannica
(www.britannica.com) was taken offline 24 hours after its initial launch
in 1999 due to a site overload. Over-provisioning
system resources for a service site to accommodate the potential peak will not
be cost-effective. As a consequence, it is important to maintain efficient
resource utilization for those services under a wide range of load conditions.
Network clients typically seek services interactively and maintaining
reasonable response time is imperative. In addition, providing differentiated
service qualities and resource allocation to multiple service classes can
also be desirable at times, especially when the system is reaching its capacity
limit and cannot provide interactive responses to all the requests.
Quality of service (QoS) support and service differentiation have been studied
extensively in network packet switching with respect to packet delay and
connection bandwidth [12,26,37]. It is
equally important to extend network-level QoS support to endpoint systems where
service fulfillment and content generation take place. Those issues are
especially critical for cluster-based Internet services in which contents are
dynamically generated and
aggregated [5,17,20,33,35].
This paper presents the design and implementation of an integrated resource
management framework for cluster-based services. This framework is part of
Neptune system: a cluster-based software infrastructure for aggregating
and replicating partitionable network services [34,35].
Neptune has been successfully deployed at Internet search engine Ask
Jeeves [5] since December 2001. Although cluster-based network
services have been widely deployed, we have seen limited research in the
literature on comprehensive resource management with service differentiation
support. Recent studies on endpoint resource management and QoS support have
been mostly focused on single-host
systems [1,2,6,7,8,27,39]
or clustered systems serving static HTTP content [3,32].
In comparison, Neptune is intended for clustered services with dynamic service
fulfillment or content generation.
The work presented in this paper addresses some of the inadequacy of the previous
studies and complements them in the following three aspects.
Flexible resource management objectives.
Most previous studies used a monolithic metric to measure resource
utilization and define QoS constraints. Commonly used ones include system
throughput, mean response time, mean stretch factor [41], or the
tail distribution of the response time [28]. We
introduce a unified quality-aware metric that links the overall system
efficiency with individual service response time. To be more specific, we
consider the fulfillment of a service request produces certain
quality-aware service yield depending on the response time.
The overall goal of the system is to maximize the
aggregate service yield resulting from all requests. As an additional goal,
the system supports service differentiation for multiple service classes.
Fully decentralized clustering architecture with quality-aware resource
management.
Scalability and availability are always overriding concerns for large-scale
cluster-based services. Several prior studies relied on centralized
components to manage resources for a cluster of replicated
servers [3,10,32,41]. In contrast, our
framework employs a functionally symmetrical architecture that does not rely
on any centralized components.
Such a design not only eliminates potential
single point of failure in the system, it is also crucial to ensuring smooth
and prompt responses to demand spikes and server failures.
Efficient resource utilization under quality constraints.
Neptune achieves efficient resource utilization through a two-level request
distribution and scheduling scheme. At the cluster level, requests for each
service class are evenly distributed to all replicated service nodes without
explicit partitioning. Inside each service node, an adaptive scheduling policy
adjusts to the runtime load condition and seeks high aggregate service yield at
a wide range of load levels. When desired, the service scheduler also provides
proportional resource allocation guarantee for specified service classes.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 illustrates a target architecture for this work
and then describes our multi-fold resource management objective.
Section 3 presents Neptune's two-level request distribution
and scheduling architecture.
Section 4 illustrates the service scheduling inside each
service node.
Section 5 presents the system implementation and
trace-driven experimental evaluations.
Section 6 discusses related work and
Section 7 concludes the paper.
2 Targeted Architecture and Resource Management Objective
In this section, we first illustrate the targeted system architecture of this
work. Then we introduce the concepts of quality-aware service yield and
service yield functions. Through these concepts, service providers can express
a variety of quality constraints based on the service response time.
Furthermore, using service yield functions and resource allocation guarantees,
our framework allows service providers to determine the desired level of
service differentiation among multiple service classes.
2.1 Targeted Architecture
Neptune targets cluster-based network services accessible to many
users through an intranet or the Internet. Inside those clusters, services are
usually partitioned, replicated, aggregated, and then delivered to external
clients through protocol gateways. Partitioning is introduced when the
service processing requirement or data volume exceeds the capacity of a single
server node. Service replication is commonly employed to improve the
system availability and provide load sharing.
Partial results may need to be aggregated across multiple data partitions
or multiple service components before being delivered to external users.
Figure 1:
A targeted system architecture: search engine.
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Figure 1 uses a prototype search engine to illustrate such a
targeted system architecture [5,18]. In this example,
the service cluster delivers search services to consumers and business partners
through Web servers and XML gateways. Inside the cluster, the main search
tasks are performed on a set of index servers and document servers, both
partitioned and replicated. Each search query first arrives at one of the
protocol gateways. Then some index servers are contacted to retrieve the
identifications of index documents related to the search query. Subsequently some
document servers are mobilized to retrieve a short description of these documents
and the final results are returned through the original protocol gateway.
The resource management work in this study focuses on resources and quality
constraints inside the service cluster. Issues related to wide-area network
latency or bandwidth is beyond the scope of this paper.
A large-scale service cluster typically consists of multiple groups of
replicated service components. We call each replication group a
sub-cluster. For instance, the replicas for partition 1 of the index
servers in Figure 1 form one such sub-cluster.
While Neptune supports the construction of multiple sub-clusters, this
paper focuses on the resource management within a single sub-cluster. Here we
give a brief discussion on the formation of sub-clusters. Each sub-cluster
typically hosts a single type of service for modularity and ease of management.
This scheme also allows for targeted resource allocation. For instance,
machines with large number of CPUs can be allocated for sub-clusters hosting
CPU-intensive service components while machines equipped with fast I/O channels
can be used for sub-clusters hosting I/O-intensive components. Nonetheless,
it is not uncommon to co-locate multiple types of service components in a
single replication group to improve resource utilization efficiency.
2.2 Quality-aware Resource Utilization
Figure 2:
Illustration of service yield functions.
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Most previous studies used a monolithic metric such as system
throughput, mean response time, mean stretch factor [41], or the
tail distribution of the response time [28] to measure the
efficiency of system resource management. We use a more comprehensive metric
by conceiving that the fulfillment of a service request provides certain yield
depending the response time. This yield, we call
quality-aware service yield, can be linked to the amount of economic
benefit or social reach resulting from serving this request in a timely fashion.
Both goals of provisioning QoS and efficient resource utilization can be
naturally combined as producing high aggregate yield. Furthermore, we
consider the service yield resulting from serving each request to be a function
of the service response time. The service yield function is normally
determined by service providers to give them flexibility in expressing desired
service qualities. Let , , , be the response times of
the service accesses completed in an operation period. Let
represent the service yield function for the th service access. The goal of
our system is to maximize the aggregate yield, i.e.
maximize |
(1) |
In general, the service yield function can be any monotonically non-increasing
function that returns non-negative numbers with non-negative inputs. We give a
few examples to illustrate how service providers can use yield functions to
express desired service qualities. For instance, the system with the yield
function
depicted in Figure 2 (A)
is intended to achieve high system throughput with a deadline . In other
words, the goal of such a system is to complete as many service accesses as
possible with the response time . Similarly, the system with the
yield function
in Figure 2 (B)
is designed to achieve low mean response time. Note that the traditional
concept of mean response time does not count dropped requests.
differs from that concept by considering dropped requests
as if they are completed in .
We notice that
does not care about the exact response
time of each service access as long as it is completed within the deadline.
In contrast,
always reports higher yield for accesses
completed faster. As a hybrid version of these two,
in
Figure 2 (C) produces full yield when the response time
is within a pre-deadline , and the yield decreases linearly
thereafter. The yield finally declines to a drop penalty when
the response time reaches the deadline .
This corresponds to the real world scenario that users are generally
comfortable as long as a service request is completed in . They
get more or less annoyed when the service takes longer and they most likely
abandon the service after waiting for . represents the full
yield resulting from a prompt response and the drop penalty
represents the loss when the service is not completed within the final
deadline . Figure 2 illustrates these
three functions. We want to point out that
is a special
case of
when ; and
is also a special
case of
when and .
Service differentiation is another goal of our multi-fold resource management
objective. Service differentiation is based on the concept of service classes.
A service class is defined as a category of
service accesses that obtain the same level of service support. On the other
hand, service accesses belonging to different service classes may receive
differentiated QoS support. Service classes can be defined based on
client identities. For instance, a special group of clients may be
configured to receive preferential service support or a guaranteed
share of system resources. Service classes can also be defined based on
service types or data partitions. For example, a order placement transaction
is typically considered more important than a catalog-browsing request.
We provide differentiated services to different service classes
on two fronts. First, service classes can acquire differentiated
service support by specifying different yield functions. For instance,
serving a VIP-class client can be configured to produce higher service yield
than serving a regular client. Secondly, each service class can be guaranteed
to receive a certain portion of system resources. Most previous service
differentiation studies have focused on one of the above two means of QoS
support [7,24,30,40]. We
believe a combination of them provides two benefits when the system
is overloaded: 1) the resource allocation is biased toward high-yield
classes for efficient resource utilization; 2) a certain portion of
system resources can be guaranteed for each service class, if needed.
The second benefit is crucial to preventing starvation for low-priority
service classes.
3 Two-level Request Distribution and Scheduling
In our framework, each external service request enters the service cluster
through one of the gateways and it is classified into one of the service
classes according to rules specified by service providers. Inside the cluster,
service components are usually partitioned, replicated, and aggregated to
fulfill the request. In this section, we discuss the cluster-level request
distribution for a partition group or sub-cluster.
The dynamic partitioning approach proposed in a previous study adaptively
partitions all replicas for each sub-cluster into several groups and each group
is assigned to handle requests from one service class [41].
We believe such a scheme has a number of drawbacks. First, a cluster-wide
scheduler is required to make server partitioning decisions, which is not only
a single-point of failure, but also a potential performance bottleneck.
Secondly, cluster-wide server groups cannot be repartitioned very frequently,
which makes it difficult to respond promptly to changing resource demand.
In order to address these problems, Neptune does not explicitly partition
server groups. Instead, we employ a symmetrical and decentralized two-level
request distribution and scheduling architecture illustrated in
Figure 3.
Figure 3:
Two-level request distribution and scheduling.
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In this scheme, each service node in a sub-cluster can process requests from
all service classes. The resource management decision is essentially made at
two levels. First, each service request is directed to one of the replicated
service nodes through the cluster-level request distribution. Upon arriving
at the service node, the request is then subject to a node-level service scheduling.
At the cluster level, Neptune employs a class-aware load balancing scheme to
evenly distribute requests for each class to all replicas. Our load balancing
scheme uses a random polling policy that discards slow-responding polls. Under
this policy, whenever a client is about to seek a service for a particular
service class, it polls a certain number of randomly selected service nodes to
obtain the load information. Then it directs the service request to the node
with the smallest number of active and queued requests. Nodes that do not
respond within a deadline are discarded. This strategy also helps exclude faulty
nodes from request distribution. In practice, we use a poll size of 3 in our
system. The polling deadline is set to be 10 ms, which is the smallest timeout
granularity supported by select system call in Linux. Our recent study
shows that such a policy is scalable and it performs well for services of small
granularities [34]. Inside each service node, Neptune must also
deal with the resource allocation across multiple service classes. This is
handled by a node-level class-aware scheduling scheme, which will be discussed
in Section 4.
An Alternative Approach for Comparison.
For the purpose of comparison, we also designed a request distribution scheme
based on server partitioning [41]. Server partitioning is adjusted
periodically at fixed intervals. This scheme uses the past resource usage to
predict the future resource demand and makes different partitioning decisions
during system under-load and overload situations.
When the aggregate demand does not exceed the total system resources,
every service class acquires their demanded resource allocation. The remaining
resources will be allocated to all classes proportional to their demand.
When the system is overloaded, in the first round we allocate to each
class its resource demand or its resource allocation guarantee, whichever is
smaller. Then the remaining resources are allocated to all classes under a
priority order. The priority order is sorted by the full yield divided by the
mean resource consumption for each class, which can be acquired through
offline profiling.
Fractional server allocations are allowed in this scheme. All servers are
partitioned into two pools, a dedicated pool and a shared pool. A service
class with 2.4 server allocation, for instance, will get two servers from the
dedicated pool and acquire 0.4 server allocation from the shared pool through
sharing with other classes with fractional allocations.
The length of the adjustment interval should be chosen carefully so that it is
not too small to avoid excessive repartitioning overhead and maintain system
stability, nor is it too large to promptly respond to demand changes.
We choose the interval to be 10 seconds in this paper. Within
each allocation interval, service requests are randomly directed to one of the
servers allocated to the corresponding service class according to the
load balancing policy [34].
4 Node-level Service Scheduling
Neptune employs a multi-queue (one per service class) scheduler inside each
node. Whenever a service request arrives, it enters the appropriate queue for
the service class it belongs to. When resources become available, the
scheduler picks a request for service. The scheduled request is not
necessarily at the head of a queue. Figure 4 illustrates
such a runtime environment of a service node.
Figure 4:
Runtime environment of a service node.
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For a service node hosting service classes:
, each
class is configured with a service yield function and optionally a
minimum system resource share guarantee , which is expressed as a percentage
of total system resources (
). The goal of the scheduling
scheme is to provide the guaranteed system resources for all service classes
and schedule the remaining resources to achieve high aggregate service yield.
Figure 5 illustrates
the framework of our service scheduling algorithm at each scheduling
point. In the rest of this section, we will discuss two aspects of
the scheduling algorithm: 1) maintaining resource allocation
guarantees; and 2) achieving high aggregate service yield.
Figure 5:
The node-level service scheduling algorithm.
-
Drop from each queue head those requests that are likely to generate zero or very small yield according to the request arrival time, expected service time and the yield function.
- Search for the service classes with non-empty request queues that have an estimated resource consumption of less than the guaranteed share. (Section 4.1)
- If found, schedule the one with the largest gap between the resource consumption and the guaranteed share.
- Otherwise, schedule a queued request that is likely to produce high aggregate service yield. (Section 4.2)
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4.1 Estimating Resource Consumption for Allocation Guarantees
In order to maintain resource allocation guarantees, we need to estimate resource consumption
for each service class at each scheduling time. This estimation should be biased toward
recent usage to stabilize quickly when the actual resource consumption jumps from one
level to another. It should not be too shortsighted either in order to avoid
oscillations or over-reactions to short-term spikes. Among many possible
functions that exhibit those properties, we define the
resource consumption for class at time to be the weighted summation
of the resource usage for all class requests completed no later
than . The weight is chosen to decrease exponentially with regard to the
elapsed time since the request completion. For each request , let
be its completion time and be its measured resource usage (we will discuss
how to measure it in the end of this sub-section), which is known after its completion.
Equation 2
defines to be the resource consumption for class at time .
Note that the time in all the following equations is denominated in seconds.
|
(2) |
Another reason for which we choose this function is that it can be
incrementally calculated without maintaining the entire service scheduling
history. If we adjust at the completion of every request and let
be the previous calculation time, the resource consumption at time can be
calculated incrementally through Equation 3.
|
(3) |
The selection of should be careful to maintain the smooth and stable
reaction for both short-term spikes and long-term consumption changes. In this
paper we empirically choose to be 0.95. Since we use second as
the unit of time in those equations, this means a service request completed one
second ago carries 95% the weight of a service request completed right now.
With the definition of , the proportional resource consumption of
class can be represented by
.
In step 2 of the service scheduling, this proportional
consumption is compared with the guaranteed share to search for
under-allocated service classes.
This resource consumption estimation scheme is related to the exponentially-weighted
moving average
(EWMA) filter used as the round-trip time predictor in TCP [14].
It differs from the original EWMA filter in that the weight in our scheme
decreases exponentially with regard to the elapsed time instead of the elapsed
number of measurement samples. This is more appropriate for estimating
resource consumption due to its time-decaying nature.
The detailed measurement of resource consumption for each request
is application-dependent. Generally speaking, each request can involve mixed
CPU and I/O activities and it is difficult to define a generic formula for all
applications. Our approach is to let application developers decide how the
resource consumption should be accounted. Large-scale service clusters are
typically composed of multiple sub-clusters of replicated service
components [5]. Each sub-cluster typically hosts a single type
of service for modularity and ease of management. Thus requests in the same
sub-cluster tend to share similar resource characteristics in terms of I/O and
CPU demand and it is not hard in practice to identify a suitable way to
measure resource consumptions. In the current implementation, we use the
accumulated CPU consumption for a thread or process acquired through Linux
/proc file system. The effectiveness of this accounting model is
demonstrated in our performance evaluation which contains a benchmark involving
significant disk I/O.
Using single dimension resources simplifies our resource accounting model.
We acknowledge that it could be desirable at times to co-locate
CPU-intensive services with I/O-intensive applications to improve resource
utilization efficiency. Accounting multi-dimension resources is not directly
tackled in this paper. However, we believe a multi-dimensional resource
accounting module can be added into our framework to address this issue.
4.2 Achieving High Aggregate Yield
In this section, we examine the policies employed in step 2b
of the service scheduling
to achieve high aggregated yield. In general, the optimization problem
of maximizing the aggregate yield is difficult to solve given the fact
that it relies on the advanced knowledge of the resource requirements of pending
requests. Even for the offline case in which the cost for each request is
known in advance, Karp has shown that the Job Sequence problem, which
is a restricted case of our optimization problem, is NP-complete [25].
Various priority-based scheduling policies were proposed in real-time database
systems to maximize aggregate realized value [22,23]. Typical
policies considered in those systems include Earliest Deadline First scheduling
(EDF) and Yield or Value-Inflated Deadline scheduling (YID).
EDF always schedules the queued request with the closest deadline. YID
schedules the queued request with the smallest inflated deadline, defined as
the relative deadline divided by the expected yield if the request is being
scheduled.
Both EDF and YID are designed to avoid or minimize the amount of lost yield.
They work well when the system resources are sized to handle transient heavy
load [22]. For Internet services, however, the client request rates
tend to be bursty and fluctuate dramatically from time to
time [5,10,11]. Over-provisioning
system resources for a service site to accommodate the potential peak will not
be cost-effective. During load spikes when systems face sustained
arrival demand exceeding the available resources, missed deadlines become
unavoidable and the resource management should instead focus on utilizing
resources in the most efficient way. This leads us to design a Greedy
scheduling policy that schedules the request with the lowest resource
consumption per unit of expected yield. The Greedy method typically performs
well when the system is overloaded. However, it is not optimal because it only
maximizes the efficiency for the next scheduled request without considering
longer impact of the scheduling decision.
In order to have a scheduling policy that works well at a wide range of load
conditions, we further design an Adaptive policy that dynamically
switches between YID and Greedy scheduling depending on the runtime load
condition. The scheduler maintains a 30-second window of recent request
dropping statistics. If more than 5% of incoming requests are dropped in the
watched window, the system is considered as overload and the Greedy scheduling
is employed. Otherwise, the YID scheduling is used.
All the above scheduling policies are priority-based scheduling with different
definition of priorities. Table 1 summarizes the priority
metrics of the four policies.
Table 1:
Summary of scheduling policies.
Policy |
Priority (the smaller the higher) |
EDF |
Relative deadline |
YID |
Relative deadline divided by expected yield |
Greedy |
Expected resource consumption divided by expected yield |
Adaptive |
Dynamically switch between YID (in under-load) and Greedy (in overload) |
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Three of these policies require a predicted service time and resource
consumption for each request at the scheduling time. For the service time, we
use an exponentially-weighted moving average of the service time of past
requests belonging to the same service class. Resource consumption measurement
is application-dependent as we have explained in the previous sub-section. In
our current implementation, such a prediction is based on an
exponentially-weighted moving average of the CPU consumptions of past requests
belonging to the same service class.
5 System Implementation and Experimental Evaluations
Neptune has been implemented on a Linux cluster. In addition to the resource
management framework described in this paper, Neptune provides load balancing
and replication support for cluster-based
services [34,35].
Application developers can easily deploy services through specifying a set of
RPC-like access methods for each service and the clients can access them
through a simple programming API. Neptune employs a symmetrical architecture in
constructing the service infrastructure. Any node can elect to provide
services and seek services from other nodes inside the service cluster. Each
external service request is assigned a service class ID upon arriving at any
of the gateways. Those requests are directed to one of the replicated service
nodes according to the class-aware load balancing scheme. Each server node
maintains multiple request queues (one per service class) and a thread pool.
To process each service request, a thread is dispatched to invoke the
application service component through dynamically-linked libraries. The size
of the thread pool is chosen to strike the balance between concurrency and
efficiency depending on the application characteristics. The aggregate
services are exported to external clients through protocol gateways. Neptune
was subsequently ported to Solaris platform. An earlier version of Neptune
has been successfully deployed at Internet search engine Ask
Jeeves [5] since December 2001. The resource management framework
described in this paper, however, has not been incorporated into the
production system.
The overall objective of the experimental evaluation is to demonstrate the
performance, scalability, and service differentiation achieved by the proposed
techniques. In particular, the first goal is to examine the system performance
of various service scheduling schemes over a wide range of load conditions.
Secondly, we will study the performance and scalability of our cluster-level
request distribution scheme. Our third goal is to investigate the system
behavior in terms of service differentiation during demand spikes and server
failures. All the evaluations were conducted on a rack-mounted Linux cluster
with 30 dual 400 MHz Pentium II nodes, each of which contains either 512 MB or
1 GB memory. Each node runs Linux 2.2.15 and has two 100 Mb/s Ethernet
interfaces. The cluster is connected by a Lucent P550 Ethernet switch with
22 Gb/s backplane bandwidth.
Our evaluation studies are based on two service workloads. The first service
is a Differentiated Search service based on an index search component
from Ask Jeeves search. This service takes in a group of encoded query words;
checks a memory mapped index database; and returns a list of URLs that are
relevant to input query words. The index database size is around 2.5 GB at
each node and it cannot completely fit in memory. The mean service time for
this service is around 250 ms in our testbed when each request is served in a
dedicated environment.
Differentiated Search distinguishes three classes of clients, representing
Gold, Silver, and Bronze memberships. We let the request composition for these
three classes be 10%, 30%, 60% respectively. The yield functions of these
service classes can be one of the three forms that we described in
Section 2.2, i.e.
,
, or
. In each case, the shapes of
the yield functions for three service classes are the same other than the
magnitude. We determine the ratio of such magnitudes to be 4:2:1 meaning that
processing a Gold request yields four times as much as a Bronze request at the
same response time. The
deadline is set to be 2 seconds. In the case of
, the
drop penalty is set to be half of the full yield and the pre-deadline
is set to be half of the absolute deadline .
Figure 6 illustrates the yield functions when they are
in each one of the three forms.
Figure 6:
Service yield functions in evaluation workloads.
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The request arrival intervals and the query words for the three Differentiated
Search service classes are based on a one-week trace we collected at Ask Jeeves search
via one of its edge Web servers. The request distribution among the edge Web
servers are conducted by a balancing switch according to the ``least
connections'' policy. Note that this trace only represents a fraction of the
complete Ask Jeeves traffic during the trace collection period.
Figure 7 shows the total and non-cached search rate of this
trace. The search engine employs a query cache to directly serve those queries
that have already been served before and cached. We are only concerned with
non-cached requests in our evaluation because only those requests invoke the
index search component.
We use the peak-time portion of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday's traces to
drive the workload for Gold, Silver, and Bronze classes respectively. For each
day, the peak-time portion we choose is the 7-hour period from 11am to 6pm EST.
The statistics of these three traces are listed in Table 2.
Note that the arrival intervals of these traces may be scaled when necessary to
generate workloads at various demand levels during our evaluation.
Figure 7:
Search requests to Ask Jeeves search via one of its edge web servers (January 6-12, 2002).
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Table 2:
Statistics of evaluation traces.
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Number of accesses |
Arrival interval |
Total |
Non-cached |
Mean |
Std-dev |
Gold |
507,202 |
154,466 |
161.3ms |
164.3ms |
Silver |
512,227 |
151,827 |
166.0ms |
169.5ms |
Bronze |
517,116 |
156,214 |
161.3ms |
164.7ms |
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The three service classes in Differentiated Search are based on the same service
type and thus have the same average resource consumption. The second service we
constructed for the evaluation is designed to have different resource consumption
for each service class, representing services differentiated on their types.
This service, we call Micro-benchmark, is based on a CPU-spinning micro-benchmark.
It contains three
service classes with the same yield functions as the Differentiated Search service.
The mean service times of the three classes are 400 ms, 200 ms, and 100 ms respectively.
We use Poisson process arrivals and exponentially distributed service times for
the Micro-benchmark service. Several previous studies on Internet connections and
workstation clusters suggested that both the HTTP inter-arrival time distribution and the
service time distribution exhibit high variance, thus are better modeled by Lognormal,
Weibull, or Pareto distributions [15,21].
We choose exponentially-distributed arrival intervals and service times
for the following reasons. First, a primary cause for the high variance of HTTP
arrival intervals is the proximity of the HTTP request for the main page and subsequent
requests for embedded objects or images. However, if we only consider resource-intensive
service requests which requires dynamic content generation, HTTP requests for embedded objects
are not counted. Secondly, the service time distribution tends to have a low variance for
services of the same type. Our analysis on the Ask Jeeves trace shows that those distributions
have similar variances as an exponentially distributed sample would have.
In this section, we study the performance of four service scheduling policies
(EDF, YID, Greedy and Adaptive) and their impact on service differentiation.
The performance metric we use in this study is
LossPercent [22], which is computed as
LossPercent
OfferedYield is the aggregated full yield of all arrived requests and
RealizedYield is the amount of yield realized by the system.
We choose the loss percentage as the performance metric because this metric is
effective in illustrating performance difference in both system under-load and
overload situations. In comparison, the actual rate (aggregate service yield
in this case) is not as illustrative as the loss percentage when the system
load is below the saturation point.
Figure 8:
Performance of scheduling policies on Differentiated Search (16 servers).
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Figure 9:
Performance of scheduling policies on Micro-benchmark (16 servers).
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Figure 8 shows the performance of scheduling policies on
Differentiated Search with 16 replicated servers. The experiments were
conducted for all three forms of yield functions:
,
, and
.
Figure 9 shows the performance of scheduling policies
on Micro-benchmark with 16 servers. Only the result for yield functions in
form is shown to save space. In each case, we show the
performance results with a varying arrival demand of up to 200% of the
available resources. The demand level cannot simply be the mean arrival rate
times the mean service time due to various system overhead. We probe the
maximum arrival rate such that more than 95% of all requests are completed
within the deadline under EDF scheduling. Then we consider the request demand
is 100% at this arrival rate. The desired demand level is then achieved by
scaling the request arrival intervals. The performance results are separated
into the under-load (arrival demand 100%) and overload (arrival demand
100%) situations. We employ no minimum resource guarantee for both
services to better illustrate the comparison on the aggregate yield.
From these results, we observe that YID outperforms Greedy by up to 49% when
the system is under-loaded and Greedy performs up to 39% better during system
overload. The Adaptive policy is able to dynamically switch between YID and
Greedy policies to achieve good performance on all studied load levels.
Figure 10:
Per-class performance breakdown of Differentiated Search at 200% arrival demand.
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To further understand the performance difference among the scheduling policies
and the impact on service differentiation, Figure 10 lists
the per-class performance breakdown for Differentiated Search service with
yield functions under 200% arrival demand. For the
per-class response time, we show both the mean values and the 95th percentile
values. We choose a high arrival demand (200%) for this experiment because
service differentiation
is more critical at higher load. Extraordinary events can cause such severe
system overload and shorter-term spikes can be more widespread in practice.
From Figure 10, we observe that all four policies achieve
similar aggregate throughput,
however, Greedy and Adaptive policies complete more requests of higher-priority
classes, representing more efficient resource utilization. In terms of the
mean response time, Greedy and Adaptive policies complete requests with
shorter mean response time, representing better quality for completed requests.
5.3 Evaluation on Request Distribution across Replicated Servers
Figure 11:
Performance and scalability of request distribution schemes.
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Figure 11 illustrates our evaluation results on two
request distribution schemes: class-aware load balancing (used in Neptune) and
server partitioning.
For each service, we show the aggregate service yield of up
to 16 replicated servers under slight under-load (75% demand), slight
overload (125% demand), and severe overload (200% demand). The Adaptive
scheduling policy is used in each server for those experiments.
The aggregate yield shown in Figure 11 is normalized to
the Neptune yield under 200% arrival demand. Our result
shows that both schemes exhibit good scalability, which is attributed to
our underlying load balancing strategy, the random-polling
policy that discards slow-responding polls [34].
In comparison, Neptune produces up to 6% more yield than server
partitioning under high demand. This is because Neptune allows the
whole cluster-wide load balancing for all service classes while server
partitioning restricts the scope of load balancing to the specific
server partition for the corresponding service class, which affects the
load balancing performance.
5.4 Service Differentiation during Demand Spikes and Server Failures
In this section, we study the service differentiation during demand spikes and
server failures. We use the Differentiated Search service with 20% resource
guarantee for each class. In order to produce constantly controllable demand
levels, we altered this service to generate fixed interval request arrivals.
Figure 12 illustrates the system behavior of such a service
under Neptune and server partitioning approaches in a 16-server configuration.
For each service class, we show the resource demand and the resource
allocation, measured in two-second intervals, over a 300-second period.
Figure 12:
System behavior during demand spike and server failure with 16
servers. Differentiated Search with 20% resource guarantee for each class is
used. One server (allocated to the Gold class under server partitioning) fails
at time 200 and it recovers at time 250.
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Initially the total demand is 100% of the available resources, with 10%,
30%, and 60% of which belong to Gold, Silver, and Bronze class respectively.
Then there is a demand spike for the Silver class between time 50 and time 150.
We observe that Neptune promptly responds to the demand spike by allocating
more resources to meet high-priority Silver class demand and dropping some
low-priority Bronze class requests. This shift stops when Bronze class
resource allocation drops to around 20% of total system resources, which is
its guaranteed share. We also see the resource allocations for Silver and
Bronze class quickly stabilize when they reach new allocation levels.
In comparison, the server partitioning scheme responds to this demand spike in
a slower pace because it cannot adjust to immediate demand changes until the
next allocation interval. We also observe that the resource allocation for
the highest-priority Gold class is isolated from this demand spike under both
schemes.
At time 200, one server (allocated to the Gold class under server partitioning)
fails and it recovers at time 250. Immediately after the server failure, we
see a deep drop of Gold class resource allocation for about 10 seconds under
server partitioning. This is again because it cannot adjust to immediate
resource change until the next allocation interval. In comparison, Neptune
exhibits much smoother behavior because losing any one server results in a
proportional loss of resources for each class. Also note that the loss of a
server reduces the available resources, which increases the relative demand
to the available resources. This effectively results in another resource
shortage. The system copes with it by maintaining enough allocation to Gold
and Silver classes while dropping some Bronze class requests.
6 Related Work
Software infrastructure for clustered services. Previous studies have
addressed the scalability and availability issues in providing software
infrastructure for cluster-based network
services [17,20,35]. In particular, TACC employs a
two-tier architecture in which the service components called ``workers'' run
on different back-ends while accesses to workers are controlled by
front-ends [17].
Our work in this paper complements these studies by proposing an integrated
resource management framework that addresses quality specification, efficient
resource utilization under quality constraints, and service differentiation
support. There are a number of recent studies on replication support for
services with
frequent updates on persistent service data [19,33,35]. The
focus of these studies is to support replica consistency in addition to the
existing requirements of scalability and availability. The resource
management framework proposed in this paper has only been evaluated with
read-only workload. The impact of update-intensive workload remains to be
addressed in the future.
Quality-of-service support and service differentiation.
The importance of providing QoS support and service differentiation has been
recognized in the networking community and the focuses of these studies is
network bandwidth allocation and packet
delay [26,37].
The methods for ensuring bandwidth usage include delaying or dropping user
requests [12,27,32] or reducing service
qualities [1,9]. Recent studies on endpoint resource
management and QoS support have been mostly focused on single-host
systems [1,2,6,7,8,27,39]
or clustered systems serving static HTTP content [3,32].
In comparison, Neptune focuses on achieving efficient resource utilization and
providing service differentiation for cluster-based services in which contents
are dynamically generated and aggregated. Recent advances in OS research have
developed approaches to provide QoS support at OS kernel
level [6,8,13,29,36,39].
Our work can be enhanced by those studies to support hard QoS guarantees and
service differentiation at finer granularities.
The concept of service quality in this resource management framework refers to
only the service response time. Service response time is important for many
applications such that the proposed techniques can be widely applied.
However, we acknowledge that service quality can have various
application-specific additional dimensions. For instance, the partial failure
in a partitioned search database results in a loss of harvest [16].
Further work is needed to address additional application-specific service
qualities.
Resource management for clustered services.
A large body of work has been done in request distribution and resource
management for cluster-based server
systems [3,4,10,31,38,41].
In particular, demand-driven service differentiation (DDSD) provides
a dynamic server partitioning approach to differentiating services from
different service classes [41]. Similar to a few other
studies [3,10], DDSD supports service differentiation
in the aggregate allocation for each service class.
In comparison, this paper presents a decentralized architecture
to achieve scalability while deploying quality-aware resource management.
Locality-aware request distribution.
Previous study has proposed locality-aware request distribution (LARD) to
exploit application-level data locality for Web server
clusters [31]. Our work does not explicitly consider data
locality because many applications are not locality-sensitive.
For example, the critical working set in many Ask Jeeves service components
are designed to fit into the system memory. Over-emphasizing on application-level
service characteristics may thus limit the applicability of our framework.
Nonetheless, it will be a valuable future work to incorporate locality-aware
heuristics into our cluster-level request distribution and evaluate its impact
on various applications.
Service scheduling.
Deadline scheduling, proportional-share resource scheduling, and value-based
scheduling have been studied in both real-time systems and general-purpose
operating
systems [7,22,23,24,30,36,40].
Client request rates for Internet services tend to be bursty and fluctuate
dramatically from time to time [5,10,11].
Delivering satisfactory user experience is important during load spikes. Based
on an adaptive scheduling approach and a resource consumption estimation
scheme, the service scheduling in Neptune strives to achieve efficient resource
utilization under quality constraints and provide service differentiation.
7 Concluding Remarks
This paper presents the design and implementation of an integrated resource
management framework for cluster-based network services. This framework is
flexible in allowing service providers to express desired service qualities
based on the service response time. At the cluster level, a scalable
decentralized request distribution architecture ensures prompt and smooth
response to service demand spikes and server failures. Inside each node, an
adaptive multi-queue scheduling scheme is employed to achieve efficient
resource utilization under quality constraints and provide service
differentiation. Our trace-driven
evaluations show that the proposed techniques can efficiently utilize system
resources under quality constraints and provide service differentiation.
Comparing with a previously proposed dynamic server partitioning approach, the
evaluations also show that our system responds more promptly to demand spikes
and behaves more smoothly during server failures.
Acknowledgment.
This work was supported in part by NSF CCR-9702640, EIA-0080134, ACIR-0082666 and 0086061.
We would like to thank Anurag Acharya, Josep Blanquer, Apostolos Gerasoulis,
Klaus Schauser, our shepherd Jim Gray, and the anonymous referees for their
valuable comments and help.
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