Performance of scheduling strategies for client-server systems

Scheduling on client-server systems has not received much attention from researchers. Based on simulation this research presents a number of insights into system behavior and scheduling. Two phenomena, CPU monopolization by large service requests and software bottlenecking are observed to have a strong influence on system performance. Software bottlenecking is a new phenomenon, observed on distributed client server systems with multiple levels of servers and occurs when a higher level server is blocked waiting for a response to a service request from a lower level server. Policies based on request characteristics such as service times and path lengths are found to effectively control these effects and improve system performance.