CS856: Topics in Distributed Systems

Internet Server Performance

Reading Schedule

• List of possible readings
• Summary Outline
• Tuesday Sept 23 (Note: Summary required only for the Flash paper)
  • 1. Paper Reading Check List, Sugih Jamin, jamin@eecs.umich.edu.
  • 2. How to Read a Research Paper, by Spencer Rugaber
  • 59. Flash: An Efficient and Portable Web Server. Vivek S. Pai, Peter Druschel, and Willy Zwaenepoel, In Proceedings of the USENIX 1999 Annual Technical Conference, Monterey, CA, June 1999.
• Tuesday Sept 30 : We'll discuss the Flash paper and we also talk about Two pairs of papers (put each pair on one page).
  • Pair 1:
    • Event-driven programming for robust software,
    • Multiprocessor Support for Event-Driven Programs,
  • Pair 2:
    • Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for High-concurrency Servers)
    • Capriccio: Scalable Threads for Internet Services
• Tuesday Oct 7
  • IO-Lite: A Unified I/O Buffering and Caching System.
  • High-Performance Memory-Based Web Servers: Kernel and User-Space Performance.
  • ETA: Experience with an Intel Xeon Processor as a Packet Processing Engine
• Tuesday Oct 14 : (No class - I have a meeting to attend out of the country)
• Tuesday Oct 21
  • Measuring the Capacity of a Web Server
  • httperf---A Tool for Measuring Web Server Performance
• Tuesday Oct 28
  • SEDA: An Architecture for Well-Conditioned, Scalable Internet Services
  • Adaptive Overload Control for Busy Internet Servers,
• Tuesday Nov 04
  • C Server Pages: An Architecture for Dynamic Web Content Generation
  • Specification and Implementation of Dynamic Web Site Benchmarks
• Tuesday Nov 11
  • Eliminating Receive Livelock in an Interrupt-driven Kernel,
  • Lazy receiver processing (LRP): a network subsystem architecture for server systems,
  • Persistent Dropping: An Efficient Control of Traffic Aggregates,
• Tuesday Nov 18
  • Web Server Workload Characterization: The Search for Invariants
  • Deconstructing SPECweb99,
    • To get a rough idea of some results for an environment based more on dynamic requests just look at and understand Table 1 (pg 12), Figure 3 (pg 16), and Figure 6 (pg 28) from the following paper. You are not required (but feel free) to read the entire paper. Please do NOT produce a summary for this paper.
      Characterizing the Scalability of a Large Web-based Shopping System
• Tuesday Nov 25 (Note: this class will be held in the boardroom upstairs at the grad house).
  • Cost-Aware WWW Proxy Caching Algorithms,
  • On-Line Response Time Optimization of An Apache Web Server