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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal Announcement
Title: Improving n-Tier Application Performance at High Resource Utilization: the Impact of Soft Resource Allocation and Management
Presented by
Qingyang Wang
School of Computer Science
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Date: Thursday, May 3, 2012
Time: 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Where: KACB - Conference Room 1202
Committee:
Summary:
Simultaneously achieving good performance and high resource utilization is an important goal for production cloud environments. Through extensive measurements of n-tier web-facing application benchmarks, we show that overall system performance at high resource utilization is surprisingly sensitive to appropriate allocation and management of soft resources (server thread pool size or database connection pool size).
Inappropriate soft resource allocation and management can degrade overall application performance significantly. Concretely, both under-allocation and over-allocation of thread pool can lead to bottlenecks in other resources because of non-trivial dependencies among the software components and hardware components in the system. We have observed some non-obvious phenomena due to these correlated bottlenecks.
For instance, inappropriate soft resource allocation may lead to a challenging rapidly oscillating bottleneck phenomenon, limiting the throughput of the entire system while none of the hardware resources in the system is fully saturated. To address this challenge, we provide several techniques to carefully allocate and manage soft resources in the system through a systematic empirical approach based on fine-grained monitoring data in each tier of the system. our results show that soft resource allocation and management plays a central role for n-tier web-facing applications to achieve good performance at high resource utilization in cloud environments.
