Publication Data
RDRP: Reward-Driven Request Prioritization for e-Commerce Web Sites
Abstract: Meeting client Quality-of-Service (QoS) expectations proves
to be a difficult task for the providers of e-Commerce services, especially when web
servers experience overload conditions, which cause increased response times and
request rejections, leading to user frustration, lowered usage of the service and
reduced revenues. In this paper, we propose a server-side request scheduling mechanism
that addresses these problems. Our Reward-Driven Request Prioritization (RDRP)
algorithm gives higher execution priority to client web sessions that are likely to
bring more service profit (or any other application-specific reward). The method works
by predicting future session structure by comparing its requests seen so far with
aggregated information about recent client behavior, and using these predictions to
preferentially allocate web server resources. Our experiments using the TPC-W benchmark
application with an implementation of the RDRP techniques in the JBoss web application
server show that RDRP can significantly boost profit attained by the service, while
providing better QoS to clients that bring more profit.
