An architecture for highly concurrent, well-conditioned internet services
Matthew David Welsh, University of California, Berkeley (Degree granting institution)
This dissertation presents an architecture for handling the massive concurrency and load conditioning demands of busy Internet services. Our thesis is that existing programming models and operating system structures do not adequately meet the needs of complex, dynamic Internet servers, which must support extreme concurrency (on the order of tens of thousands of client connections) and experience load spikes that are orders of magnitude greater than the average. We propose a new software framework, called the staged event-driven architecture (or SEDA), in which applications are constructed as a network of event-driven stages connected with explicit queues. In this model, each stage embodies a robust, reusable software component that performs a subset of request processing. By performing admission control on each event queue, the service can be well-conditioned to load, preventing resources from being overcommitted when demand exceeds service capacity. SEDA employs dynamic control to tune runtime parameters (such as the scheduling parameters of each stage) automatically, as well as to manage load, for example, by performing adaptive load shedding
Thesis, Dissertation, English, 2002