A Load Balancing Scheme for Cluster-based Secure Network Servers

Jin-Ha Kim, Gyu Sang Choi and Chita R. Das

IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster 2005)
Boston, Massachusetts, USA, September 27 - 30, 2005

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Abstract

Although the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is the most popular protocol to provide a secure channel between a client and a cluster-based network server, its high overhead degrades the server performance considerably, and thus, affects the server scalability. Therefore, improving the performance of SSL-enabled network servers is critical for designing scalable and high performance data centers.

In this paper, we examine the impact of SSL offering and SSL-session aware distribution in cluster-based network servers. We propose a backend forwarding scheme, called ssl_with_bf, that employs a low-overhead user-level communication mechanism like VIA to achieve good load balance among server nodes. We compare three distribution models for network servers: Round Robin (RR), ssl_with_session and ssl_with_bf through simulation. The experimental results with 16-node and 32-node cluster configurations show that while session reuse of ssl_with_session is critical to improve the performance of application servers, the proposed backend forwarding scheme can further enhance the performance due to better load balancing. The ssl_with_bf scheme can minimize average latency by about 40% and improve throughput across a variety of workloads.

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