Distributed Packet Rewriting and its Application to Scalable Server Architectures

To construct high performance Web servers, system builders are increasingly turning to distributed designs. An important challenge that arises in such designs is the need to direct incoming connections to individual hosts. Previous methods for connection routing (Layer 4 Switching) have employed a centralized node to handle all incoming requests. In contrast, we propose a distributed approach, called Distributed Packet Rewriting (DPR), in which all hosts of the distributed system participate in connection routing. DPR promises better scalability and fault-tolerance than the currrent practice of using centralized, special-purpose connection routers. In this paper, we describe our implementation of four variants of DPR and compare their performance. We show that DPR provides performance comparable to centralized alternatives, measured in terms of throughput and delay. Also, we show that DPR enhances the scalability of Web server clusters by eliminating the performance bottleneck exhibit...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ICNP
• Authors: Azer Bestavros, Mark Crovella, Jun Liu, David Martin
• Keywords: Centralized, Computer Networks, DPR Provides Performance, ICNP 1998, Web Server