A METHOD FOR IMPROVING THE SCALABILITY AND RESPONSIVENESS OF AN ONLINE SERVICE

摘要

An online service may be made scalable without compromising maintenance requirements and while maintaining modularity. Multiple levels of hierarchically organised clusters allow the processing required by the service to be devolved to the appropriate level in the clustered hierarchy. This is accomplished by assigning each user of the service to a "home" cluster ("ACI" - Application Cluster Instance) and maintaining a Global User Directory ("GUD") which may be used to locate the home cluster of a given user. Thus, rather than having to synchronise multiple servers or clusters, the user's requests are instead served by their "home" cluster wherever possible and appropriate.