USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - Internet Technologies & Systems 99
Efficient Support for Content-Based Routing in Web Server Clusters
Chu-Sing Yang and Mon-Yen Luo, National Sun Yat-Sen University
Abstract
Clustered server architectures have been employed for many years on
the Internet as a way to increase performance, reliability and scalability
in the presence of the Internet's explosive growth. A routing mechanism
for mapping requests to individual servers within cluster is at the heart
of any server clustering techniques. In this paper, we first analyze the
deficiencies of existing request-routing approaches. Based on these observations,
we argue that the request routing mechanism in a cluster-based server should
factor in the content of a request in making decisions. Thus, we designed
and implemented a new mechanism to efficiently support content-aware routing
in Web server clusters. With this mechanism, we also built in a number
of sophisticated content-aware intelligence for making routing decision.
Performance evaluation on a prototype implementation demonstrates substantial
performance improvements over contemporary routing schemes. The proposed
mechanism can also enable many new capabilities in cluster-based servers,
such as sophisticated load balancing, differentiated service, special content
deployment, session integrity, etc.
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