Improving availability and performance with application-specific data replication

17 January 2005

journal article
Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering

Vol. 17 (1) , 106-120
https://doi.org/10.1109/tkde.2005.10

Abstract

The emerging edge services architecture promises to improve the availability and performance of Web services by replicating servers at geographically distributed sites. A key challenge in such systems is data replication and consistency, so that edge server code can manipulate shared data without suffering the availability and performance penalties that would be incurred by accessing a traditional centralized database. This work explores using a distributed object architecture to build an edge service data replication system for an e-commerce application, the TPC-W benchmark, which simulates an online bookstore. We take advantage of application-specific semantics to design distributed objects that each manages a specific subset of shared information using simple and effective consistency models. Our experimental results show that by slightly relaxing consistency within individual distributed objects, our application realizes both high availability and excellent performance. For example, in one experiment, we find that our object-based edge server system provides five times better response time over a traditional centralized cluster architecture and a factor of nine improvement over an edge service system that distributes code but retains a centralized database.

Keywords

This publication has 28 references indexed in Scilit:

End-to-end WAN service availability
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2003
TPC-W e-commerce benchmark evaluation
Computer, 2003
The costs and limits of availability for replicated services
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 2001
Characterizing the scalability of a large web-based shopping system
ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 2001
Lessons from giant-scale services
IEEE Internet Computing, 2001
Globe: a wide area distributed system
IEEE Concurrency, 1999
The dangers of replication and a solution
ACM SIGMOD Record, 1996
Managing update conflicts in Bayou, a weakly connected replicated storage system
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 1995
Optimizing vote and quorum assignments for reading and writing replicated data
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 1989
A quorum-consensus replication method for abstract data types
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 1986