A performance study of Bistro, a scalable upload architecture

Abstract

Hot spots are a major obstacle to achieving scalability in the Internet. We have observed that the existence of hot spots in upload applications (whose examples include submission of income tax forms and conference paper submission) is largely due to approaching deadlines. The hot spot is exacerbated by the long transfer times. To address this problem, we proposed Bistro , a framework for building scalable wide-area upload applications, where we employ intermediaries, termed bistros , for improving the efficiency and scalability of uploads. Consequently, appropriate assignment of clients to bistros has a significant effect on the performance of upload applications and thus constitutes an important research problem. Therefore, in this paper we focus on the assignment of clients to bistros problem and present a performance study which demonstrates the potential performance gains of the Bistro framework.