Games and interactive application workloads are synchronized

Next: Games exhibit strong, diurnal Up: Potential for multiplexing gain Previous: Game workloads are synchronized

Games and interactive application workloads are synchronized

While Section 5.1 shows the difficulty in obtaining statistical multiplexing gain between different games, on-demand computing infrastructure could still be useful for multiplexing between other applications such as web servers. In order to examine this, we obtained web server logs over a week for three commercial sites. The sites included those for a North American cereal manufacturer, a North American credit card company, and an international beverage manufacturer. Table 3 describes the traces of the web servers, all from the week of August 13, 2001. The servers themselves were located in geographically distributed data centers and the individual logs from each site were aggregated and sorted into a single log file. Using these traces, we plotted the normalized load for the web server against the normalized global aggregate load of Half-Life during the same week in August 2004.

As Figure 12 shows, workloads for web and on-line games share similar daily periodic peaks. This particular week of game traffic does not have a strong weekend rise (perhaps due to being from the summer), but the web traffic does slump during the weekends as Figures 12(a) and 12(b) show. Interestingly, Half-life shows considerably less variance than the North American websites, but similar variance to the international beverage manufacturer website. Intuitively, it makes sense that applications and web sites with global usage patterns are more consistently busy and have less daily variance. Due to the international popularity of Half-Life, its usage pattern is quite similar to that of the international beverage company's web site. Overall, these results indicate that infrastructure sharing between applications during the week will have a somewhat limited benefit with some potential for multiplexing gain during the weekends and during the ``off hours'' for geocentric applications.

Total connections		71,253
Geographically resolvable		30,226
From North America		9,414
From Asia		9,814
From Europe		8,788
From other continents		2,210

$\includegraphics[width=0.42\textwidth]{figures/geoload_mshmro}$

$\includegraphics[width=0.42\textwidth]{figures/geo_coke_vs_mshmro_na}$	$\includegraphics[width=0.42\textwidth]{figures/geo_coke_vs_mshmro_eu}$
(a) North America	(b) Europe

Next: Games exhibit strong, diurnal Up: Potential for multiplexing gain Previous: Game workloads are synchronized

2005-08-10