Scheduling strategies to improve response time for web applications

Abstract. We propose a tunable scheduling strategy that lies between FIFO and shortest- rst, based on the value of a coe cient Alpha. If Alpha is set to zero then this strategy is just FIFO. Larger Alpha gets us closer to shortest- rst strategy which isknown to provide optimal response time. However, unlike the shortest- rst, proposed scheduling strategy is starvation free. This scheduling strategy, called Alpha scheduling with no preemption, allows to improve overall response time per HTTP request more than 3 times under heavy load. We demonstrate our results with a simple simulation model using SpecWeb96 to generate representative WWW workload.