Cataclysm: Scalable overload policing for internet applications

In this paper we present the Cataclysm server platform for handling extreme overloads in hosted Internet applications. The primary contribution of our work is to develop a low overhead, highly scalable admission control technique for Internet applications. Cataclysm provides several desirable features, such as guarantees on response time by conducting accurate size-based admission control, revenue maximization at multiple time-scales via preferential admission of important requests and dynamic capacity provisioning, and the ability to be operational even under extreme overloads. Cataclysm can transparently trade-off the accuracy of its decision making with the intensity of the workload allowing it to handle incoming rates of several tens of thousands of requests/second. We implement a prototype Cataclysm hosting platform on a Linux cluster and demonstrate the benefits of our integrated approach using a variety of workloads.