Understanding the management of client perceived response time

Abstract

Understanding and managing the response time of web services is of key importance as dependence on the World Wide Web continues to grow. We present Remote Latency-based Management (RLM), a novel server-side approach for managing pageview response times as perceived by remote clients, in real-time. RLM passively monitors server-side network traffic, accurately tracks the progress of page downloads and their response times in real-time, and dynamically adapts connection setup behavior and web page content as needed to meet response time goals. To manage client perceived pageview response times, RLM builds a novel event node model to guide the use of several techniques for manipulating the packet traffic in and out of a web server complex, including fast SYN and SYN/ACK retransmission, and embedded object removal and rewrite. RLM operates as a stand-alone appliance that simply sits in front of a web server complex, without any changes to existing web clients, servers, or applications. We have implemented RLM on an inexpensive, commodity, Linux-based PC and present experimental results that demonstrate its effectiveness in managing client perceived pageview response times on transactional e-commerce web workloads. Copyright 2006 ACM.