Dynamic Content Web Applications: Crash, Failover, and Recovery Analysis

This work assesses how crashes and recoveries affect the performance of a replicated dynamic content web application. RobustStore is the result of retrofitting TPC-W’s online bookstore with Treplica, a middleware for building dependable applications. Implementations of Paxos and Fast Paxos are at the core of Treplica’s efficient and programmer friendly support for replication and recovery. The TPCW benchmark, augmented with faultloads and dependability measures, is used to evaluate the behaviour of Robust- Store. Experiments apply faultloads that cause sequential and concurrent replica crashes. RobustStore’s performance drops by less than 13% during the recovery from two simultaneous replica crashes. When subject to an identical faultload and a shopping workload, a five replicas Robust- Store maintains an accuracy of 99.999%. Our results display not only good performance, total autonomy and uninterrupted availability, they also show that it is simple to program recovery-oriented applications using Treplica.