A testbed for performance evaluation of load-balancing strategies for Web server systems

摘要

To improve response time of a Web site, one replicates the site on multiple servers. The effectiveness of a replicated server system will depend on how the incoming requests are distributed among replicas. A large number of load-balancing strategies for Web server systems have been proposed. In this paper we describe a testbed that can be used to evaluate the performance of different load-balancing strategies. The testbed uses a general architecture which allows different load-balancing approaches to be supported easily. It emulates a typical World Wide Web scenario and allows variable load generation and performance measurement. We have performed some preliminary experiments to measure the performance of a few policies for load balancing using this testbed.