GIT-CERCS-06-11
Mohamed S. Mansour, Karsten Schwan, Sameh Abdelaziz,
I-Queue: Smart Queues for Service Management
Modern enterprise applications and systems are characterized
by complex underlying software structures, constantly evolving feature
sets, and frequent changes in the data on which they operate. The
dynamic nature of these applications and systems poses substantial challenges
to their use and management, suggesting the need for automated
solutions. This paper considers a specific set of dynamic changes, large
data updates that reflect changes in the current state of the business,
where the frequency of such updates can be multiple times per day. The
paper then presents techniques and their middleware implementation
for automatically managing requests streams directed at server applications
subjected to dynamic data updates, the goal being to improve
application reliability in face of evolving feature sets and business data.
These techniques (1) automatically detect input patterns that lead to
performance degradation or failures and then (2) use these detections
to trigger application-specific methods that control input patterns to
avoid or at least, defer such undesirable phenomena. Lab experiments
using actual traces from Worldspan show a 16% decrease in frequency
of server restarts when using these techniques, at negligible costs in additional
overheads and within delays suitable for the rates of changes
experienced by this application.