Abstract. Today's information technology departments have significantly varying demands for resources due to unexpected surges in subscriber demands (e.g., a large response to a product promotion). Further complicating matters is that many resource actions done in response to surges (e.g., provisioning or de-provisioning an application server) have substantial delays (lead times) between initiating the resource action and its taking effect. This paper describes dynamic surge protection, an approach to handling unexpected workload surges in systems that have lead times for resource actions. Dynamic surge protection incorporates three technologies: adaptive short-term forecasting, on-line capacity planning, and configuration management. The paper includes empirical results from evaluations done on a research testbed, including favorable comparisons with a threshold-based heuristic. The results from an extended test also show that service objectives can be maintained costeffectively.

Abstract.Optimizing configuration parameters is time-consuming and skills-intensive. This paper proposes a generic approach to automating this task. By generic, we mean that the approach is relatively independent of the target system for which the optimization is done. Our approach uses online adjustment of configuration parameters to discover the system's performance characteristics. Doing so creates two challenges: (1) handling interdependencies between configuration parameters and (2) minimizing the deleterious effects on production workload while the optimization is underway. Our approach addresses (1) by including in the architecture a rule-based component that handles interdependencies between configuration parameters. For (2), we use a feedback mechanism for online optimization that searches the parameter space in a way that generally avoids poor performance at intermediate steps. Our studies of a DB2 Universal Database Server under an e-commerce workload indicate that our approach can be effective in practice.

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