Simulation Analysis for Configuring Web Clusters

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High-volume web sites often use clusters of servers with load balancing as a way to increase the performance, scalability, and availability of the sites. Load balancing, usually performed by load balancer in front of such clusters, is a technique to spread workload between several computers or resources, in order to get optimal resource utilization or response time. In this paper we examine the performance for several configurations of cluster-based web servers using a simulation approach. We investigate two types of buffering scheme (common and local) for web clusters and three load balancing policies (uniformly random, round robin, and least queue first), using response time as a performance measure. We also examine two basic approaches of scaling web clusters: adding more servers of same type or upgrading the capacity of the servers in the clusters.