Design, implementation, and evaluation of a client characterization driven web server

ABSTRACT

In earlier work we proposed a way for a Web server to detect connectivity information about clients accessing it in order to take tailored actions for a client request. This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of such a working system. A Web site has a strong incentive to reduce the 'time-to-glass' to retain users who may otherwise lose interest and leave the site. We have performed a measurement study from multiple client sites around the world with various levels of connectivity to the Internet communicating with modified Apache Web servers under our control. The results show that clients can be classified in a correct and stable manner and that user-perceived latency can be reduced via tailored actions. Our measurements show that classification and determination of server actions are done without significant overhead on the Web server. We explore a variety of modified actions ranging from selecting a lower quality version of the resource to altering the manner of content delivery. By studying numerous performance related factors in a single unified framework and examining both individual actions as well as combination of actions, our modified Web server implementation shows the efficacy of various server actions.

REFERENCES

• 1: T. F. Abdelzaher and N. Bhatti. Web Server QoS management by Adaptive Content Delivery. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Quality of Service, London, England, June 1999. http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~zaher/iwqos99.ps
• 2: Apache Software Foundation. http://www.apache.org
• 3: Apache HTTP Server Benchmarking Tool. http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/programs/ab.html
• 4: Hari Balakrishnan , Mark Stemm , Srinivasan Seshan , Randy H. Katz, Analyzing stability in wide-area network performance, Proceedings of the 1997 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems, p.2-12, June 15-18, 1997, Seattle, Washington, United States
• 5: Nina Bhatti , Anna Bouch , Allan Kuchinsky, Integrating user-perceived quality into Web server design, Proceedings of the 9th international World Wide Web conference on Computer networks : the international journal of computer and telecommunications netowrking, p.1-16, June 2000, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• 6: J. Carlstrom and R. Rom. Application-aware Admission Control and Scheduling in Web Servers. In Proceedings of the IEEE Infocom 2002 Conference, New York City, June 2002. IEEE. http://www.ieee-infocom.org/2002/papers/560.pdf
• 7: Xiangping Chen , Prasant Mohapatra , Huamin Chen, An admission control scheme for predictable server response time for web accesses, Proceedings of the 10th international conference on World Wide Web, p.545-554, May 01-05, 2001, Hong Kong, Hong Kong [doi>10.1145/371920.372156]
• 8: convert. http://www.imagemagick.org/www/convert.html
• 9: Balachander Krishnamurthy , Jia Wang, On network-aware clustering of Web clients, Proceedings of the conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, p.97-110, August 28-September 01, 2000, Stockholm, Sweden
• 10: Balachander Krishnamurthy , Craig E. Wills, Analyzing factors that influence end-to-end Web performance, Proceedings of the 9th international World Wide Web conference on Computer networks : the international journal of computer and telecommunications netowrking, p.17-32, June 2000, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• 11: Balachander Krishnamurthy , Craig E. Wills, Improving web performance by client characterization driven server adaptation, Proceedings of the 11th international conference on World Wide Web, May 07-11, 2002, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA [doi>10.1145/511446.511486]
• 12: Balachander Krishnamurthy , Craig Wills , Yin Zhang, Preliminary measurements on the effect of server adaptation for web content delivery, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet measurment, November 06-08, 2002, Marseille, France [doi>10.1145/637201.637250]
• 13: J. C. Mogul and L. S. Brakmo. Method for dynamically adjusting multimedia content of a Web page by a server in accordance to network path characteristics between client and server, June 2001. United States Patent 6,243,761.
• 14: Jeffrey C. Mogul , Fred Douglis , Anja Feldmann , Balachander Krishnamurthy, Potential benefits of delta encoding and data compression for HTTP, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM '97 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication, p.181-194, September 14-18, 1997, Cannes, France
• 15: D. Mosberger and T. Jin. httperf--A Tool for Measuring Web Server Performance. In Proceedings of WISP '98, Madison, Wisconsin, USA, June 1998. http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/David_Mosberger/httperf
• 16: Henrik Frystyk Nielsen , James Gettys , Anselm Baird-Smith , Eric Prud'hommeaux , Håkon Wium Lie , Chris Lilley, Network performance effects of HTTP/1.1, CSS1, and PNG, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM '97 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication, p.155-166, September 14-18, 1997, Cannes, France
• 17: W. Noureddine and F. Tobagi. Improving the Performance of Interactive TCP Applications Using Service Differentiation. In Proceedings of the IEEE Infocom 2002 Conference, New York City, June 2002. IEEE. http://www.ieee-infocom.org/2002/papers/354.pdf
• 18: S. Seshan, M. Stemm, and R. H. Katz. SPAND: Shared Passive Network Performance Discovery. In USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, Monterey, California, USA, Dec. 1997. http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~srini/Papers/publications/1997.USITS/usits97.ps
• 19: K.-P. Vo. Vmalloc: A General and Efficient Memory Allocator. Software: Practice and Experience, 26:1-18, 1996. http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/vmalloc
• 20: Kiem-Phong Vo, CDT: a container data type library, Software—Practice & Experience, v.27 n.10, p.1177-1197, Oct. 1997 [doi>10.1002/(SICI)1097-024X(199710)27:10<1177::AID-SPE125>3.0.CO;2-7]
• 21: wget. http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html
• 22: Craig E. Wills , Mikhail Mikhailov , Hao Shang, N for the price of 1: bundling web objects for more efficient content delivery, Proceedings of the 10th international conference on World Wide Web, p.257-265, May 01-05, 2001, Hong Kong, Hong Kong [doi>10.1145/371920.372061]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.5 COMPUTER SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION

  D. Software
  D.0 GENERAL

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
apache server, client classification, content delivery, httperf, server adaptation, web performance