Towards an Adaptive Service Degradation Approach for Handling Server Overload

While people get used to surfing web, managing the overload of web applications has become a critical problem for application providers. Targeting overload issue of complex, dynamic web applications, this paper presents an adaptive service degradation approach. Our approach attempts to automatically locate the bottleneck inside the applications and generate proper degradation plans in real time. This is accomplished through internally monitoring the performance and resource utilization state of the application, which is decomposed into a set of services. By dynamic controlling the bottleneck of resource utilization, the application can keep providing key services even when overload occurs, for example, by degrading only the service which consumes critical resources and has a low priority from the perspective of business logic. We implement a prototype and conduct a case study with a business application. The case study demonstrates the approach is effective when overload occurs.