FLEX: Load balancing and management strategy for scalable Web hosting service

FLEX is a new scalable "locality aware" solution for achieving both load balancing and efficient memory usage on a cluster of machines hosting several web sites. FLEX allocates the sites to different machines in the cluster based on their traffic characteristics. This aims to avoid the unnecessary document replication to improve the overall performance of the system. The desirable routing can be done by submitting the corresponding configuration files to the DNS server since each hosted web site has a unique domain name. FLEX can be easily implemented on top of the current infrastructure used by Web hosting service providers. Using a simulation model and a synthetic trace generates we compare the Round-Robin based solutions and FLEX over the range of different workloads. For generated traces, FLEX outperforms Round-Robin based solutions 2-5 times.