Scheduling and Latency-Addressing the Bottleneck

Abstract

As e-business applications become more commonplace and more sophisticated, there is a growing need to distribute the server side of the application in order to meet business objectives and to provide maximum service levels to customers. However, it is well known that the effective distribution of an application across available resources is difficult, especially for novices. Careful attention must be paid to the fact that performance is critical – business is likely to be lost to a competitor if potential customers do not receive the level of service they expect in terms of both time and functionality. Modern globalised businesses may have their operational units scattered across several countries, yet they must still present a single consolidated front to a potential customer. Similarly, customers are becoming more sophisticated in their demands on e-business systems and this necessitates greater computational support on the server side of the transaction. This chapter focuses on two performance bottlenecks: scheduling and communication latency. The chapter discusses an adaptive scheduling system to automatically distribute the application across the available resources such that the distribution evolves to a near-optimal allocation tailored to each user, and the concept of Ambassadors to minimize communication latency in wide-area distributed applications.