Design and Implementation of a Scalable Web Cluster System Using a Light-Weight Cluster Control Protocol

Abstract

The need for web services is constantly increasing, while the requirements for web services are getting more and more complicated. Thus, web server systems with ever increasing performance are constantly in need. To efficiently satiate this need, web cluster systems, which have been a topic of much research, have been suggested due to its scalability. In this paper, we design and implement a scalable web cluster system using a light-weight cluster control protocol on the IP layer in the Linux operating system. Experimental results illustrate that our implementation of the web cluster system linearly improves performance as the server nodes increase. We show that although the web cluster control protocol implemented on the IP layer does not support any reliable mechanism, the problem related to packet loss or fault has little effect on the system performance.