ISYS 2402 / 2403 : Load balancing

Lecturer

For any question regarding this section, please contact the lecturer directly.

Survey paper

Research questions

  1. Describe the relative advantages and disadvantages of "hardware scale-up" and "software scale-up" in dealing with increased demand for web-server systems. Address how local and global "scale-out" can further improve performance and reliability.
  2. Investigate how DNS/A-DNS can be as a means to route requests amongst multiple web servers, and discuss the limitations that DNS caching places on this approach.
  3. Discuss the relative merits of the different static, dynamic and content-aware dispatching algorithms for distributing requests in a web-server farm.
  4. Investigate the technical details distinguishing Layer-4 and Layer-7 request routing, and discuss the relative merits and limitations of one-way or two-way architectures when routing in this fashion.
  5. There are a number of different arrangements that can constitute a local web-server cluster. Discuss the specific configuration/topology and the relative merits of locally distributed web-servers, cluster-based web systems and virtual web clusters.