An integrated approach with feedback control for robust Web QoS design

There is a growing demand for provisioning of different levels of quality of service (QoS) on scalable Web servers to meet changing resource availability and to satisfy different client requirements. In this paper, we investigate the problem of providing proportional QoS differentiation with respect to response time on Web servers. We first present a processing rate allocation scheme based on the foundations of queueing theory. It provides different processing rates to requests of different client classes so as to achieve the differentiation objective. At application level, process is used as the resource allocation principal for achieving processing rates on Apache Web servers. We design and implement an adaptive process allocation approach, guided by the queueing-theoretical rate allocation scheme, on an Apache server. This application-level implementation, however, shows weak QoS predictability because it does not have fine-grained control over the consumption of resources that the kernel consumes and hence the processing rate is not strictly proportional to the number of processes allocated. We then design a feedback controller and integrate it with the queueing-theoretical approach. It adjusts process allocations according to the difference between the target response time and the achieved response time using a proportional integral derivative controller. Experimental results demonstrate that this integrated approach can enable Web servers to provide robust proportional response time differentiation.