Differentiated quality of service for e-Commerce applications through connection scheduling based on system-level thread priorities

The e-commerce web sites receive a great and varied number of visitors every day. These visitors share the ap-plication server’s limited resources and when there are too many clients connecting to the web site, it is possible that they hinder between them, even to overload the applica-tion server. These visitors can be divided in different cat-egories, depending on their importance from site viewpoint. Considering the importance that in these web sites some client connections (e.g. buyers ’ connections) finish success-fully before other connections, in this paper we propose a mechanism to provide different quality of service to the dif-ferent client categories by assigning different priorities to the threads attending the connections. After observing that Java Thread Priorities are only applied within the JVM, and moreover, these priorities do not reach the O.S. threads, we propose to schedule threads using the Linux Real Time pri-orities. Our results demonstrate that different quality of ser-vice classes can be supported using this mechanism.