General-purpose operating systems provide inadequate support for resource management in large-scale servers. Applications lack sufficient control over scheduling and management of machine resources, which makes it difficult to enforce priority policies, and to provide robust and controlled service. There is a fundamental mismatch between the original design assumptions underlying the resource management mechanisms of current general-purpose operating systems, and the behavior of modern server applications. In particular, the operating system's notions of protection domain and resource principal coincide in the process abstraction. This coincidence prevents a process that manages large numbers of network connections, for example, from properly allocating system resources among those connections. We propose and evaluate a new operating system abstraction called a resource container, which separates the notion of a protection domain from that of a resource principal. Resource containers ...

This paper presents the design of a new Web server architecture called the asymmetric multiprocess event-driven (AMPED) architecture, and evaluates the performance of an implementation of this architecture, the Flash Web server. The Flash Web server combines the high performance of single-process event-driven servers on cached workloads with the performance of multi-process and multithreaded servers on disk-bound workloads. Furthermore, the Flash Web server is easily portable since it achieves these results using facilities available in all modern operating systems. The performance of different Web server architectures is evaluated in the context of a single implementation in order to quantify the impact of a server's concurrency architecture on its performance. Furthermore, the performance of Flash is compared with two widely-used Web servers, Apache and Zeus. Results indicate that Flash can match or exceed the performance of existing Web servers by up to 50 % across a wide range of real workloads. We also present results that show the contribution of various optimizations embedded in Flash.

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of IO-Lite, a unified I/O buffering and caching system. IO-Lite unifies all buffering and caching in the system, to the extent permitted by the hardware. In particular, it allows applications, interprocess communication, the filesystem, the file cache, and the network subsystem to share a single physical copy of the data safely and concurrently. Protection and security are maintained through a combination of access control and read-only sharing. The various subsystems use (mutable) buffer aggregates to access the data according to their needs. IO-Lite eliminates all copying and multiple buffering of I/O data, and enables various cross-subsystem optimizations. Performance measurements show significant performance improvements on Web servers and other I/O intensive applications. 1 Introduction This paper presents the design, the implementation, and the performance of IO-Lite, a unified I/O buffering and caching system. IO-Li...

Widely-used operating systems provide inadequate support for large-scale Internet server applications. Their algorithms and interfaces fail to efficiently support either event-driven or multi-threaded servers. They provide poor control over the scheduling and management of machine resources, making it difficult to provide robust and controlled service. We propose new UNIX interfaces to improve scalability, and to provide fine-grained scheduling and resource management. 1 Introduction The performance of Internet server applications on a general purpose operating system is often dismayingly lower than what one would expect from the underlying hardware. Internet servers also suffer from other undesirable properties such as poor scalability, unfair resource allocation, susceptibility to livelock under excess load, instability under denial of service attacks, and inability to prioritize handling of requests. The cause of these problems is a fundamental mismatch between the original design ...

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Distributed multimedia applications will be an important part of tomorrow's application mix and require appropriate operating system (OS) support. Neither hard real-time solutions nor best-effort solutions are directly well suited for this support. One reason is the coexistence of real-time and best effort requirements in future systems. Another reason is that the requirements of multimedia applications are not easily predictable, like variable bit rate coded video data and user interactivity. In this article, we present a survey of new developments in OS support for (distributed) multimedia systems, which include: (1) development of new CPU and disk scheduling mechanisms that combine real-time and best effort in integrated solutions; (2) provision of mechanisms to dynamically adapt resource reservations to current needs; (3) establishment of new system abstractions for resource ownership to account more accurate resource consumption; (4) development of new file system structures; (5) ...

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This dissertation describes cost-effective design and implementation of scalable web based high performance multimedia-on-demand (MOD) servers and services. An important aspect of this dissertation has been prototyping, deploying MOD applications, services and servers and learning from this experience. The three main components of this dissertation are (1) Web based interactive MOD services, (2) innovative enhancements to a server node operating system (OS) to support such MOD services, and (3) design and prototyping of a scalable server architecture and associated data layout and scheduling schemes to support a large number of independent, concurrent clients. We first describe design and prototyping of two example multimedia-on-demand services, namely interactive recording service for content crea...

This paper looks at the I/O bottleneck in operating systems, with particular focus on high-speed networking. We start by identifying the causes of this bottleneck, which are rooted in a mismatch of operating system behavior with the performance characteristics of modern computer hardware. Then, traditional approaches to supporting I/O in operating systems are re-evaluated in light of current hardware performance tradeoffs. This re-evaluation gives rise to a set of novel techniques that eliminate the I/O bottleneck. The root cause of the OS I/O bottleneck is that speed improvements of main memory have lagged behind those of the central processing unit (CPU) and I/O devices during the past decade [6]. In state-of-the-art computer systems, the bandwidth of main memory is orders of magnitude lower than the bandwidth of the CPU, and the bandwidths of the fastest I/O devices approach that of main memory

Applications requiring high-speed TCP/IP processing can easily saturate a modern server. We and others have previously suggested alleviating this problem in multiprocessor environments by dedicating a subset of the processors to perform network packet processing. The remaining processors perform only application computation, thus eliminating contention between these functions for processor resources. Applications interact with packet processing engines (PPEs) using an asynchronous I/O (AIO) programming interface which bypasses the operating system. A key attraction of this overall approach is that it exploits the architectural trend toward greater thread-level parallelism in future systems based on multi-core processors. In this paper, we conduct a detailed experimental performance analysis comparing this approach to a best-practice configured Linux baseline system.