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Serializing Web Application Requests

Issue 55

From Issue #55
November 1998

Nov 01, 1998  By Colin Wilson
 in
Mr. Wilson tells us how he improved web response time and kept users happy using the Generic Network Queueing System (GNQS).
Future Directions

Queuing requests with GNQS allows another interesting option which we may pursue in the future as our processing demands increase. Instead of migrating the server again to an even more powerful machine or to the complexity of an array of web servers, we could retain the existing web server as a front-end server. Without any changes in the CGI scripts on the web server, GNQS could be reconfigured to distribute queued jobs across as many additional machines as necessary to meet our response time requirements. Since GNQS can also do load balancing, expansion can be done easily, efficiently and dynamically with no server down time. The number of queue servers would be completely transparent to the web server.

Evaluation

There are a number of ways to handle web applications which require significant back-end processing time. Optimizing application servers requires different techniques than optimizing servers for high hit rates. For application servers, the limiting resource may be CPU, memory or disk I/O, rather than network bandwidth. Response times to given requests are expected to be relatively slow, and informing waiting users of the status of their jobs is important. Queuing requests with GNQS and referring the user to a results page has proven to be an effective, easily implemented and robust technique.

Acknowledgements

Colin C. Wilson has been programming and administering UNIX systems since 1985. He has been happily playing with Linux for the past four years while employed at the University of Washington, developing DNA analysis software and keeping the systems up at the Human Genome Center. When he's not busy recovering from the latest disaster, he can be reached at colin@u.washington.edu.

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