An Evalulation of the Pool Maintenance Overhead in Reliable Server Pooling Systems

Reliable server pooling (RSerPool) is a protocol framework for server redundancy and session failover, currently still under standardization by the IETF RSerPool WG. An important property of RSerPool is its lightweight architecture: server pool and session management can be realized with small CPU power and memory requirements. That is, RSerPool-based services can also be managed and provided by embedded systems. Currently, there has already been some research on the performance of the data structures managing server pools. But a generic, application- independent performance analysis - in particular also including measurements in real system setups - is still missing. Therefore, the aim of this paper is - after an outline of the RSerPool framework, an introduction to the pool management procedures and a description of our pool management approach - to first provide a detailed performance evaluation of the pool management structures themselves. Afterwards, the performance of a prototype implementation is analysed in order to evaluate its applicability under real network conditions.