Efficient Web Requests Scheduling Considering Resources Sharing

Requests scheduling in Web servers is a hot research topic. Many works aim at providing optimal algorithms according to various metrics. Most of these works are based on classical scheduling metrics, considering jobs completion times, but ignoring intermediate states. We claim that this choice conduces to the design of algorithm that do not efficiently share the system resources. Indeed, Web servers have some properties that make them different than the system considered in usual scheduling theory. The classical round-robin policy, used in most production Web servers, has intrinsic qualities: it shares equally the system resources and avoids any job starvation. We introduce a novel parameterizable algorithm proposing a compromise between the benefits of the round-robin and the policies that provide the best performances. Then, we discuss the appropriate choice of the parameter depending in the requirements and the context of the Web server.