The Concurrency Control (CC) scheme employed can profoundly affect the performance of transaction-processing systems. In this paper, a simple unified approximate analysis methodology to model the effect on system performance of data contention under different CC schemes and for different system structures is developed. This paper concentrates on modeling data contention and then, as others have done in other papers, the solutions of the data contention model are coupled with a standard hardware resource contention model through an iteration. The methodology goes beyond previously published methods for analyzing CC schemes in terms of the generality of CC schemes and system structures that are handled. The methodology is applied to analyze the performance of centralized transaction processing systems using various optimistic- and pessimistic-type CC schemes and for both fixed-length and variable-length transactions. The accuracy of the analysis is demonstrated by comparison with simulations. It is also shown how the methodology can be applied to analyze the performance of distributed transaction-processing systems with replicated data.
A distributed multi-server Web site can provide the scalability necessary to keep up with growing client demand at popular sites. Load balancing of these distributed Web-server systems, consisting of multiple Web servers for document retrieval and a Domain name server (DNS) for address resolution, opens interesting new problems. In this paper, we investigate the e ects of using a more active DNS which, as an atypical centralized scheduler, applies some scheduling strategy in routing the requests to the most suitable Web server. Unlike traditional parallel/distributed systems in which a centralized scheduler has full control of the system, the DNS controls only a very small fraction of the requests reaching the multi-server Web site. This peculiarity, especially in the presence of highly skewed load, makes it very di cult to achieve acceptable load balancing and avoid overloading some Web server. This paper adapts traditional scheduling algorithms to the DNS, proposes new policies, and examines their impact under di erent scenarios. Extensive simulation results show the advantage of strategies that make scheduling decisions on the basis of the domain that originates the client requests, and limited server state information (e.g. whether a server is overloaded or not). An initially unexpected result is that using detailed server information, especially based on history, does not seem useful in predicting the future load, and can often lead to degraded performance.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.