Analysis of request balancing in non-dedicated web clusters

Abstract

The amount of services and information available on the Internet, such as banking and business transactions, social networks, blogs and even interactive games, has steadily increased. Web providers must be prepared to support this growing demand for information and communication. In this sense, the use of web server clusters together with the balancing of requests has been an important strategy for distributing the services among several processors in a balanced way. This paper describes and discusses architectural and operational issues of request balancing, especially dynamic balancing, covering concepts, techniques and solutions. Real experiments were performed in different configurations on a cluster of Apache servers non dedicated exclusively to web service. The mod_proxy_balancer load balancing module was used with intensive synthetic overloads and a new balancing method called byalltraffic was proposed and evaluated. The results show that the balancing in this type of system will be more efficient if the external network workload to the web service is detected and used in the balancing factor.