Replicating Web applications on-demand

Many Web-based commercial services deliver their content using Web applications that generate pages dynamically based on user profiles, request parameters etc. The workload of these applications are often characterized by a large number of unique requests and a significant fraction of data updates. Hosting these applications drives the need for systems that replicates both the application code and its underlying data. We propose the design of such a system that is based on on-demand replication, where data units are replicated only to servers that access them often. This reduces the consistency overhead as updates are sent to a reduced number of servers. The proposed system allows complete replication transparency to the application, thereby allowing developers to build applications unaware of the underlying data replication. We show that the proposed techniques can reduce the client response time by a factor of 5 in comparison to existing techniques for a real-world e-commerce application used in the TPC-W benchmark. Furthermore, we evaluate our strategies for a wide range of workloads and show that on-demand replication performs better than centralized and fully replicated systems by reducing the average latency of read/write data accesses as well as the amount of bandwidth utilized to maintain data consistency.