text: Unexpected increases in demand and most of all flash crowds are considered the bane of every web application as they may cause intolerable delays or even service unavailability. Proper quality of service policies must guarantee rapid reactivity and responsiveness even in such critical situations. Previous solutions fail to meet common performance requirements when the system has to face sudden and unpredictable surges of traffic. Indeed they often rely on a proper setting of key parameters which requires laborious manual tuning, preventing a fast adaptation of the control policies. We contribute an original Self-* Overload Control (SOC) policy. This allows the system to self-configure a dynamic constraint on the rate of admitted sessions in order to respect service level agreements and maximize the resource utilization at the same time. Our policy does not require any prior information on the incoming traffic or manual configuration of key parameters. We ran extensive simulations under a wide range of operating conditions, showing that SOC rapidly adapts to time varying traffic and self-optimizes the resource utilization. It admits as many new sessions as possible in observance of the agreements, even under intense workload variations. We compared our algorithm to previously proposed approaches highlighting a more stable behavior and a better performance.
  @cite_18: How to effectively allocate system resource to meet the service level agreement (SLA) of Web servers is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an improved scheme for autonomous timing performance control in Web servers under highly dynamic traffic loads. We devise a novel delay regulation technique called queue length model based feedback control utilizing server internal state information to reduce response time variance in presence of bursty traffic. Both simulation and experimental studies using synthesized workloads and real-world Web traces demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach
summary: The authors of @cite_18 also address a very important decision problem in the design of the monitoring module: the timing of performance control. They propose to adapt the time interval between successive decisions to the size of workload dependent system parameters, such as the processor queue length. The dynamic adjustment of this interval is of primary importance for threshold based policies for which a constant time interval between decisions may lead to an oscillatory behavior in high load scenarios as we show in Section . Simulations reveal that our algorithm is not subject to oscillations and shows a very little dependence on the time interval between decisions.