Selection algorithms for replicated Web servers

Replication of documents on geographically distributed servers can improve both performance and reliability of the Web service. Server selection algorithms allow Web clients to select one of the replicated servers which is "close" to them and thereby minimize the response time of the Web service. Using client proxy server traces, we compare the effectiveness of several "proximity" metrics including the number of hops between the client and server, the ping round trip time and the HTTP request latency. Based on this analysis, we design two new algorithms for selection of replicated servers and compare their performance against other existing algorithms. We show that the new server selection algorithms improve the performance of other existing algorithms on the average by 55%. In addition, the new algorithms improve the performance of the existing non-replicated Web servers on average by 69%.

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