On the effectiveness of content-aware load distribution for Web clusters

Over the past few years, there has been a significant interest in content-aware routing that use the information found in the payload of packets to provide intelligent control on load distribution in Web clusters. This paper reexamines the idea of content-aware routing and finds that routing Web traffic based on more information of packet payload dose not always yield better performance. We then propose a mechanism that can effectively remedy the deficiencies of existing approaches. The results of performance measurements show that the proposed solution can improve the benefits of the content-aware clustering techniques.