Scalability
Distributed systems operate effectively and efficiently at many different scales, ranging from a small intranet to the Internet. A system is described as scalable if it will remain effective when there is a significant increase in the number of resources and the number
of users. The number of computers and servers in the Internet has increased dramatically. Figure 1.6 shows the increasing number of computers and web servers during the 12-year history of the Web up to 2005 [zakon.org]. It is interesting to note the significant growth in both computers and web servers in this period, but also that the relative percentage is flattening out – a trend that is explained by the growth of fixed and mobile personal computing. One web server may also increasingly be hosted on multiple computers.
The design of scalable distributed systems presents the following challenges:
Controlling the cost of physical resources: As the demand for a resource grows, it should be possible to extend the system, at reasonable cost, to meet it. For example, the frequency with which files are accessed in an intranet is likely to grow as the number of users and computers increases. It must be possible to add server computers to avoid the performance bottleneck that would arise if a single file server had to handle all file access requests. In general, for a system with n users to be scalable, the quantity of physical resources required to support them should be at most O(n) – that is, proportional to n. For example, if a single file server can support 20 users, then
two such servers should be able to support 40 users. Although that sounds an obvious goal, it is not necessarily easy to achieve in practice.
Controlling the performance loss: Consider the management of a set of data whose size is proportional to the number of users or resources in the system – for example, the table with the correspondence between the domain names of computers and their Internet addresses held by the Domain Name System, which is used mainly to look up DNS names such as www.amazon.com. Algorithms that use hierarchic structures
scale better than those that use linear structures. But even with hierarchic structures an increase in size will result in some loss in performance: the time taken to access hierarchically structured data is O(log n), where n is the size of the set of data. For a system to be scalable, the maximum performance loss should be no worse than this.
Preventing software resources running out: An example of lack of scalability is shown by the numbers used as Internet (IP) addresses (computer addresses in the Internet). In the late 1970s, it was decided to use 32 bits for this purpose, but as will be explained in Chapter 3, the supply of available Internet addresses is running out.
For this reason, a new version of the protocol with 128-bit Internet addresses is being adopted, and this will require modifications to many software components. To be fair to the early designers of the Internet, there is no correct solution to this problem. It is difficult to predict the demand that will be put on a system years ahead. Moreover, overcompensating for future growth may be worse than adapting to a change when we are forced to – larger Internet addresses will occupy extra space in messages and in computer storage.
Avoiding performance bottlenecks: In general, algorithms should be decentralized to avoid having performance bottlenecks. We illustrate this point with reference to the predecessor of the Domain Name System, in which the name table was kept in a single master file that could be downloaded to any computers that needed it. That was
fine when there were only a few hundred computers in the Internet, but it soon became a serious performance and administrative bottleneck. The Domain Name System removed this bottleneck by partitioning the name table between servers located throughout the Internet and administered locally.
Some shared resources are accessed very frequently; for example, many users may access the same web page, causing a decline in performance. caching and replication may be used to improve the performance of resources that are very heavily used.
Ideally, the system and application software should not need to change when the scale of the system increases, but this is difficult to achieve. The issue of scale is a dominant theme in the development of distributed systems. The techniques that have been successful are discussed extensively in this book. They include the use of replicated data, the associated technique of caching and the deployment of multiple servers to handle commonly performed tasks, enabling several similar tasks to be performed concurrently.
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