Design and implementation of an efficient web cluster with content-based request distribution and file caching

  • Authors:

  • Mei-Ling Chiang;Yu-Chen Lin;Lian-Feng Guo

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Information Management, National Chi-Nan University, Puli, Taiwan, ROC;Department of Information Management, National Chi-Nan University, Puli, Taiwan, ROC;Department of Information Management, National Chi-Nan University, Puli, Taiwan, ROC

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Systems and Software
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We have implemented an efficient and scalable web cluster named LVS-CAD/FC (i.e. LVS with Content-Aware Dispatching and File Caching). In LVS-CAD/FC, a kernel-level one-way content-aware web switch based on TCP Rebuilding is implemented to examine and distribute the HTTP requests from clients to web servers, and the fast Multiple TCP Rebuilding is implemented to efficiently support persistent connection. Besides, a file-based web cache stores a small set of the most frequently accessed web files in server RAM to reduce disk I/Os and a light-weight redirect method is developed to efficiently redirect requests to this cache. In this paper, we have further proposed new policies related to content-based workload-aware request distribution, in which the web switch considers the content of requests and workload characterization in request dispatching. In particular, web files with more access frequencies would be duplicated in more servers' file-based caches, such that hot web files can be served by more servers. Our goals are to improve cluster performance by obtaining better memory utilization and increasing the cache hit rates while achieving load balancing among servers. Experimental results of practical implementation on Linux show that LVS-CAD/FC is efficient and scales well. Besides, LVS-CAD/FC with the proposed policies can achieve 66.89% better performance than the Linux Virtual Server with a content-blind web switch.