TITLE:  Scheduling Your Network Connections (the SYNC 
project)

Is it possible to reduce the expected response time of every 
request at a Web server, simply by changing the order in 
which we schedule the requests?  Our research says yes.

We propose a method for improving the performance of Web 
servers servicing static HTTP requests.  The idea is to give 
preference to requests for small files or requests with 
short remaining file size, in accordance with the SRPT 
(Shortest Remaining Processing Time) scheduling policy.  We 
prove both analytically and via kernel-level implementation 
that SRPT scheduling can substantially improve mean response 
times over the traditional FAIR scheduling policy, without 
penalizing requests for large files.

The above work appeared in [Transactions Computer Systems 
2003].  I will also discuss more recent work in the SYNC 
project, including: Web servers servicing dynamic requests 
and QOS scheduling in the database [ICDE 04]; Overloaded Web 
servers and coping with transient overload [ITC 03]; 
Fairness/unfairness characteristics of all scheduling 
policies [Sigmetrics 03].

JOINT WORK WITH:  my students: Bianca Schroeder, Adam 
Wierman, David McWherter