Understanding, modelling, and improving the performance of web applications in multicore virtualised environments

Abstract

As the computing industry enters the Cloud era, multicore architectures and virtualisation technologies are replacing traditional IT infrastructures. However, the complex relationship between applications and system resources in multicore virtualised environments is not well understood. Workloads such as web services and on-line financial applications have the requirement of high performance but benchmark analysis suggests that these applications do not optimally benefit from a higher number of cores.In this paper, we try to understand the scalability behaviour of network/CPU intensive applications running on multicore architectures. We begin by benchmarking the Petstore web application, noting the systematic imbalance that arises with respect to per-core workload. Having identified the reason for this phenomenon, we propose a queueing model which, when appropriately parametrised, reflects the trend in our benchmark results for up to 8 cores. Key to our approach is providing a fine-grained model which incorporates the idiosyncrasies of the operating system and the multiple CPU cores. Analysis of the model suggests a straightforward way to mitigate the observed bottleneck, which can be practically realised by the deployment of multiple virtual NICs within our VM. Next we make blind predictions to forecast performance with multiple virtual NICs. The validation results show that the model is able to predict the expected performance with relative errors ranging between 8 and 26%.

Detection of J2EE Patterns based on Customizable Features

“…These services can be integrated with enterprise applications to create amazing mapping applications or integrate maps and GIS capabilities into existing web, mobile and desktop applications. Java Pet Store [47], is a sample application, developed under Java Blue Prints program by Sun Microsystems. It is a reference application for Ajax web applications on Java Enterprise Edition Platform that uses J2EE Patterns.…”

“…It is a reference application for Ajax web applications on Java Enterprise Edition Platform that uses J2EE Patterns. [30] ejbca_ce_6_3_1_1 Geoserver [44] geoserver-1.7.0 Ofbiz [40] Apache OFBiz 16.11.01 Openbravo [34] openbravo-3.0 Java Pet Store [47] petstore-1_3_1_02…”

CloudScope: Diagnosing and Managing Performance Interference in Multi-tenant Clouds

“…Many benchmarking studies are devoted to understanding the performance of EC2 VM instances [1], [16], their network [3], [6], [17] and applications deployed in them [18], [19]. These studies found that virtualization and multi-tenancy are the major causes for resource contention as multiple VMs are placed on a single host.…”

“…VMware Distributed Resource Sched- [29] or CloudStack resource manager [15]) that handle SLO violations, dynamic VM scaling and elastic server consolidation [30], [31]. CloudScope incorporates the VM application SLO monitor and evaluator developed in our previous work [19], [32]. Figure 3 illustrates the overall system architecture which consists of three main parts:…”

“…The resource metrics include CPU utilization, memory consumption, disk I/O request statistics, network I/O, number of virtual CPUs (vCPUs), and number of virtual NICs (vNICs). External monitoring tools [19] are used to keep track of application SLOs in terms of application metrics such as response time, disk/network throughput, or job completion time. The resource and SLO profiling metrics are fed to the Interference Handling Manager.…”