Measuring the cost of scalability and reliability for Internet-based, server-centered applications

With large numbers of geographically dispersed clients, a centralized approach to Internet-based application development is not scalable and also not dependable. This paper presents a decentralized approach to dependable Internet-based application development, consisting of a logical structuring of collaborating sub-systems of geographically separated replicated servers. Two implementations of an Internet auction, one using a centralized approach and the other using our decentralized approach, are described. To evaluate the scalability of the two approaches, a number of experiments are performed on these implementations and the results are presented.