Summary: Using Mini-Flash Crowds to Infer Resource Constraints in
Remote Web Servers
Pratap Ramamurthy , Vyas Sekar
, Aditya Akella , Balachander Krishnamurthy , Anees Shaikh
University of Wisconsin-Madison ,
Carnegie Mellon University
AT & T Labs­Research ,
IBM Research
ABSTRACT
Unexpected surges in request traffic (e.g., flash crowds) can ex-
ercise server-side resources such as access bandwidth, CPU, and
disks in unanticipated ways. Administrators today do not have the
requisite tools to fully understand the effect that flash crowds can
have on server-side resources. As a result, most Web-servers today
rely on significant over-provisioning, strict admission control, or
alternatively use potentially expensive solutions like CDNs to pro-
vide high availability under load. A more fine-grained understand-
ing of the performance of servers under emulated but controlled
flash crowd like conditions can guide administrators to make more
efficient provisioning and resource management decisions.

Source: Akella, Aditya - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Fisher, Kathleen - AT&T Labs Research
Liblit, Ben - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences