A business-oriented load dispatching framework for online auction sites

Online auction sites have unique workloads and user behavior characteristics that do not exist in other e-commerce sites. Earlier studies by the authors identified i) significant changes in the workload depending on time of day and ii) the presence of heavy-tailed distributions involving bidder and seller behavior. Other studies indicate that a small fraction or power users, among millions of registered users, contribute to the majority of the site's revenue. Poor quality of service to power users may imply in loss of business and cause significant loss of revenue to an auction site. This problem could be mitigated by dedicating resources in an exclusive manner to this small group of users in order to improve the quality of service they receive. However, this approach can lead to i) under utilization of these dedicated resources and ii) overloading of resources allocated to regular users when the load from power users is low. In this paper, we propose a scheme whereby resources are primarily dedicated to power users, but regular users can take advantage of these dedicated resources when spare capacity is available. This paper provides a business-oriented framework for dispatching requests to the various servers of an online auction site. Our approach uses a controller that can dynamically shift the load to different types of servers as the workload changes. Experimental evaluation showed, among other things, that the total number of bids processed using a dynamic controller to allocate resources can be improved under heavy load conditions compared to using a load balancing technique that does not differentiate among users.