Request distribution for fairness with a new load-update mechanism in web server cluster

Abstract

The complexity of services and applications provided by Web sites is ever increasing as integration of traditional Web publishing sites with new paradigms, i.e., e-commerce. Each dynamic Web page is difficult to estimate its execution load even with the information from the application layer. In this paper the execution latency at Web server is exploited in order to balance loads from dynamic Web pages. With only the information such as IP address and port number for Layer-4 Web switch the proposed algorithm balances the loads with a new load-update mechanism. The mechanism uses the report packets more efficiently with the same communication cost. Moreover the proposed algorithm considers the fairness for Web clients hence the Web clients would experience higher quality of service. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2004.