Understanding and managing the response time of web services is of key importance as dependence on the World Wide Web continues to grow. We present Remote Latency-based Management (RLM), a novel server-side approach for managing pageview response times as perceived by remote clients, in real-time. RLM passively monitors server-side network traffic, accurately tracks the progress of page downloads and their response times in real-time, and dynamically adapts connection setup behavior and web page content as needed to meet response time goals. To manage client perceived pageview response times, RLM builds a novel event node model to guide the use of several techniques for manipulating the packet traffic in and out of a web server complex, including fast SYN and SYN/ACK retransmission, and embedded object removal and rewrite. RLM operates as a stand-alone appliance that simply sits in front of a web server complex, without any changes to existing web clients, servers, or applications. We...
David P. Olshefski, Jason Nieh