A preemptive connection pool manager for web-based application collaboration

Most of web-based applications are free marketing systems. They compete network resources usually in first-come-first-service (FCFS) mechanism. As a big company with thousands of applications, Comcast faces how to maximize its revenue through all these applications. Currently, all these applications have no collaborations even they are considered in one big system. When the resource limit is reached and increasing the capacity is not an applicable method, FCFS may degrade critical services with running some less important applications. We propose a priority-based collaboration solution. Every application has its pre-determined priority. When the network resource is all occupied, new incoming requests from applications with higher priorities preempt those with lower priorities and so the high priority work can be processed with sacrificing the low priority work's performance. Specifically, we implement a connection pool manager that admits new connections for the critical requests at the cost of preempting out some less important connections when the system safety limitation is approached. The major win here is that we increase our system usability for the most important features and maximize the revenue during a traffic burst exceeding our resource capacity.