Using User Hints to Guide Resource Management for Quality of Service

Today's computing environments are becoming more and more distributed in nature. At the same time, the applications used in these environments are becoming more complicated and are being used in more mission critical roles in the enterprise. Consequently, users' demands for performance , reliability, and availability are increasing rapidly. To meet these needs, a high level of quality of service must be delivered to the user. Doing so, however, is not an easy task. Applications that are the focus of user interest and activity should be favoured in resource allocation and scheduling to provide the best possible quality, as opposed to those applications which are essentially ignored by the user. Fortunately , users often provide hints of their interest and activity through interactions with their windowing environments or applications directly. For example, applications that users are not attending to tend to get minimized or covered over on the window desktop in favour of those on which the user is focusing. Unfortunately, essentially all existing quality of service solutions are not receptive to these user hints|with all applications having the same rights to quality and resources regardless of whether or not the user is giving any attention to them. This results in resources being wasted and spread thin over some applications unnecessarily , and quality expectations for other applications not being satissed. To address these problems, we have developed a quality of service management system capable of detecting and making use of these user hints to guide resource management, based on our previous work in this area. We present our general strategy, the design of a solution realizing this approach , and a preliminary prototype implementation based on this architecture. We describe experimentation and experience to date and evaluate our work and its eeectiveness based on these preliminary results. Finally, we conclude with a summary of our work and outline our plans to evolve it in the future.