An Evaluation of the Pool Maintenance Overhead in Reliable Server Pooling Systems

Currently, the IETF RSerPool WG is standardizing a generic protocol framework for server redundancy and session failover: Reliable Server Pooling (RSerPool). An important property of RSerPool is its lightweight architecture: server pool and session management can be realized with small CPU power and memory requirements. That is, RSerPool-based services can also be managed and provided by embedded systems. Up to now, there has already been some research on the performance of the data structures managing server pools. But a generic, application-independent performance analysis – in particular also including measurements in real system setups – is still missing. The aim of this article is therefore – after giving an outline of the RSerPool framework, an introduction to the pool management procedures and a description of our pool management approach – to first provide a detailed performance evaluation of the pool management structures themselves. Afterwards, the performance of a prototype implementation is analysed in order to evaluate its applicability in a real network setup.