An analytical model for multi-tier internet services and its applications

- Since many Web applications employ a multi-tier architecture, in this paper, we focus on the problem of analytically modeling the behavior of such applications. We present a model based on a network of queues, where the queues represent different tiers of the application. Our model is sufficiently general to capture (i) the behavior of tiers with significantly different performance characteristics and (ii) application idiosyncrasies such as session-based workloads, tier replication, load imbalances across replicas, and caching at intermediate tiers. We validate our model using real multi-tier applications running on a Linux server cluster. Our experiments indicate that our model faithfully captures the performance of these applications for a number of workloads and configurations. For a variety of scenarios, including those with caching at one of the application tiers, the average response times predicted by our model were within the 95% confidence intervals of the observed aver...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Bhuvan Urgaonkar, Giovanni Pacifici, Prashant J. Shenoy, Mike Spreitzer, Asser N. Tantawi
• Keywords: Model, SIGMETRICS 2005, Tiers, Web Applications