An Analytical Model for Multi-tier Internet Services and Its Applications Bhuvan Urgaonkar, Giovanni Pacificiy, Prashant Shenoy, Mike Spreitzery, and Asser Tantawiy Dept. of Computer Science, y Service Management Middleware Dept., University of Massachusetts, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Amherst, MA 01003 Hawthorne, NY 10532 fbhuvan,
[email protected] fgiovanni,mspreitz,
[email protected] ABSTRACT that is responsible for HTTP processing, a middle tier Java enterprise Since many Internet applications employ a multi-tier architecture, server that implements core application functionality, and a back- in this paper, we focus on the problem of analytically modeling the end database that stores product catalogs and user orders. In this behavior of such applications. We present a model based on a net- example, incoming requests undergo HTTP processing, processing work of queues, where the queues represent different tiers of the by Java application server, and trigger queries or transactions at the application. Our model is sufficiently general to capture (i) the database. behavior of tiers with significantly different performance charac- This paper focuses on analytically modeling the behavior of multi- teristics and (ii) application idiosyncrasies such as session-based tier Internet applications. Such a model is important for the follow- workloads, tier replication, load imbalances across replicas, and ing reasons: (i) capacity provisioning, which enables a server farm caching at intermediate tiers. We validate our model using real to determine how much capacity to allocate to an application in or- multi-tier applications running on a Linux server cluster. Our exper- der for it to service its peak workload; (ii) performance prediction, iments indicate that our model faithfully captures the performance which enables the response time of the application to be determined of these applications for a number of workloads and configurations.