REGULATING RESPONSE TIME IN AN AUTONOMIC COMPUTING SYSTEM: A COMPARISON OF PROPORTIONAL CONTROL AND FUZZY CONTROL APPROACHES

Ecommerce is an area where an Autonomic Computing system could be very effectively deployed. Ecommerce has created demand for high quality information technology services and businesses areseeking quality of service guarantees from their service providers. These guarantees are expressed aspart of service level agreements. Properly adjusting tuning parameters for enforcement of the servicelevel agreement is time-consuming and skills-intensive. Moreover, in case of changes to the workload, thesetting of the parameters may no longer be optimum. In an ecommerce system, where the workloadchanges frequently, there is a need to update the parameters at regular intervals. This paper describestwo approaches, one, using a proportional controller and two, using a fuzzy controller, to automate thetuning of MaxClients parameter of Apache web server based on the required response time and thecurrent workload. This is an illustration of the self-optimizing characteristic of an autonomic computingsystem.