Request-Aware Scheduling for Busy Internet Services

— Internet traffic is bursty and network servers are often overloaded with surprising events or abnormal client request patterns. This paper studies scheduling algorithms for interactive network services that use multiple threads to handle incoming requests continuously and concurrently. Our investigation with applications from Ask Jeeves search shows that during overloaded situations, requests that require excessive computing resource can dramatically affect the overall system throughput and response time. The most effective method is to manage resource usage at a request level instead of a thread or process level. We propose a new size-adaptive request-aware scheduling algorithm called SRQ with dynamic feedbacks to control queue properties and have implemented SRQ in the Linux kernel level. Our experimental results with several application service benchmarks indicate that the proposed scheduler can significantly outperform the standard Linux scheduler.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Jingyu Zhou, Caijie Zhang, Tao Yang, Lingkun Chu
• Keywords: Abnormal Client Request, Algorithm Called Srq, Communications, INFOCOM 2006, Scheduling Algorithm