Integrating Theoretical Modeling and Experimental Measurement for Soft Resource Allocation in Multi-Tier Web Systems

Soft resources, which are system software components that use hardware or synchronize the use of hardware, are playing a critical role in the performance of multi-tier web systems, and thus it is quite important to tune the soft resource allocation for using the limited hardware resources to obtain maximum effectiveness. In this paper, we integrate both theoretical and experimental studies to the soft resource allocation problem. Specifically, we apply the queueing network model for formulating multi-tier web systems, and conduct experimental measurements based on the RUBiS benchmark system to obtain precise model parameters. Quantitative analysis is carried out, based on which an optimization model as well as an algorithm are put forward for soft resource allocation. The efficacy of our approach is validated by both theoretical analyses and experimental results.