Automatic Tuning of the Keep-alive Parameter of Web Servers based on Request-waiting Intervals

Manual parameter-tuning of Internet servers causes high administrative costs because it requires administrator's expertise and huge amounts of time. The keep-alive parameter, which is one of major parameters in web servers, may cause severe degradation if it is not set properly. In this paper, we present an automatic tuning technique of the keep-alive parameter. Our mechanism adjusts the parameter without administrator's intervention so as to maintain active connections between clients and a server while closing inactive connections by observing request-waiting intervals. We implemented a prototype for Apache web server. Experimental results show that our prototype automatically adjusted the parameter and successfully yielded the nearly optimal server performance on two different workloads.