Redirection Algorithms for Load Sharing in Distributed Web-Server Systems

Replication of information among multiple Web servers is necessary to support high request rates to popular Web sites. A clustered Web-server organization is preferable to multiple independent mirrored-servers because if maintains a single interface to the users and has the potential to be more scalable, fault-tolerant and better load balanced. In this paper we propose a Web cluster architecture in which the Domain Name Server system (DNS), that dispatches the user requests among the servers throught the URL to IP address mapping mechanism, is integrated with a redirection request mechanism based on the HTTP protocol. This would alleviate the side effect of caching the IP address mapping to reduce traffic.
We have compared many alternative mechanisms, including synchronous vs. asynchronous activation, and centralized vs. distributed decision on redirection. Moreover, we have analyzed coarse and fine grain reassignments, i.e., reassignment of entire domains or individual client requests, different types of status information, i.e., server and domain load information, and server selection policies for redirecting requests. Our results showed that the combination of centralized and distributed dispatching allows the Web server cluster to handle the high load skews in the WWW environment.