The Reverse C10K Problem for Server-Side Mashups

Abstract

The original C10K problem [1] studies how to provide reasonable service to 10, 000 simultaneous clients or HTTP requests using a normal web server. We call the following problem the reverse C10K problem, or RC10K -how to support 10, 000 simultaneous outbound HTTP requests running on a web server. The RC10K problem can be found in scenarios like service orchestrations and server-side mashups. A server-side mashup needs to send several simultaneous HTTP requests to partner services for each inbound request. Many approaches to improving the performance and scalability of HTTP servers can be applied to tackle the original C10K problem. However, whether these approaches can tackle the reverse C10K problem needs to be verified. In this paper, we discuss the RC10K problem for server-side mashups, and propose a design that takes advantage of advanced I/O, multithreading, and eventdriven programming. The results of analysis and experiments show that our design can reduce the resource requirements by almost one order of magnitude with the same performance provided, and it is promising to tackle the RC10K problem.

Scaling Instant Messaging Communication Services

“…The authors of Liu and Deters (2008) investigated the reverse C10k (RC10k) problem. Supporting 10,000 outbound HTTP requests presents a different challenge to handling an equal number of inbound requests.…”