Experimental studies of scalability in clustered Web systems

Summary form only given. As the Internet is becoming more robust with the addition of new services such as audio and video streaming, e-commerce, and news casting, the traditional Web server architecture is unable to keep up with the increasing demands and requisites of such new services. This situation has created a need for secure, reliable, highly available, and scalable Web servers that rely on clustering technologies to be able to meet the growth in the user base and offered services. Our work is concerned with scalability and performance of clustered Web systems based on open technologies. We study the scalability of clustered Web servers and HTTP traffic distribution methods through an experimental testbed and present the results of a series of experiments we conducted to benchmark the performance and scalability of a clustered Web system. We describe the prototyped target cluster and its components; the benchmarking methodology, metrics, and test scenarios; and the performance and scalability test results. The results demonstrate nonlinear scalability. We use these results to better understand scalability and performance issues in clustered systems. In future work, we aim to design and build linearly scalable Web server platforms within the concept of next generation Internet server.