The effects of server placement and server selection for internet services

Abstract

Many services on the Internet are provided by multiple identical servers in order to improve performance and robustness. The number, the location and the distribution of servers affect the performance and reliability of a service. The server placement is, however, often determined based on the empirical knowledge of the administrators. This paper investigates issues of the server placement in terms of the service performance and the server load. We identify that a server selection mechanism plays an important role in server placement, and thus, evaluate different server selection algorithms. The result shows that it is essential to the robustness of a service to employ a mechanism which distributes service requests to the servers according to the measured response time of each server. As a case study, we evaluate the server selection mechanisms employed by different DNS (Domain Name System) implementations. Then, we show the effects of the different server selection algorithms using root-server measurements taken at different locations around the world.