Optimizing network performance in replicated hosting

Abstract

Most important commercial Web sites maintain multiple replicas of their server infrastructure to increase both reliability and performance. In this paper, we study how many replicas should be used and where they should be placed in order to improve client network performance, including both the latency (e.g., round-trip time) between clients and the replicas, and the bandwidth performance between them. This study is based on a large scale measurement study from an 18-node infrastructure, which reveals for the first time the distribution of today's Internet end-user access bandwidth. For example, we find that 50% of end users have access bandwidth less than 4.2Mbps. Using a greedy algorithm, we show that the first five replicas dominate latency optimization in our measurement infrastructure, while the first two replicas dominate bandwidth optimization. We also found that geographic diversity does not help as much for bandwidth optimization as it does for latency. To determine the proper trade-off between latency and bandwidth, we use a simplified TCP model to show that, when content size is less than 10Kb, the deployment should focus on optimizing latency, while for content sizes larger than 1 Mb, the deployment should focus on optimizing bandwidth.