A Test bed for performance evaluation of load balancing strategies for Web Server Systems

Many large web sites get more than 100 million hits everyday. They need a scalable web server system that can provide better performance to all the clients that may be in dierent geographical regions. Higher delays and losses are common on WAN links. To provide a better service to all the clients, it is natural to have fully replicated web server clusters in dierent geographical regions. In such an environment, one of the most important issue is that of server selection (and load balancing). The client's request should be directed to one of the servers in a way that the response can be quick. We assume that web servers are functionally homogeneous, i.e. any one of them can serve any client request. Another important point is that this system should not require modication of any client side component or existing standard protocol