A Petri Net approach to analyze the effect of persistent connection on the scalability of web services

Web Service is providing large amounts of information via Internet everyday and wins great success. In the development of HTTP protocol, TCP connection multiplexing technique, called dasiakeep-alivepsila or dasiapersistent connectionpsila, plays significant roles in its evolution. Many years passed, keep-alive mechanism has been implemented widely to support all kinds of web service. However, dramatic changes to network conditions and computing capacity challenge the motivation and the validity of such scheme. This paper measures a bunch of key metrics in modern Web service and networks, and constructs one Petri Net model for connection management procedure in Web services. The analytical results yielded by the model, along with real-world measurement, help us to predict how persistent connection affect the scalability of busy Web services nowadays.