Title: Reboot-based recovery of performance anomalies in adaptive bitrate video-streaming services

Authors: Carlos A.S. Cunha; Luis A.M. Silva

Addresses: Polytechnics Institute of Viseu, University of Coimbra, Portugal ' Department of Informatics, University of Coimbra, Portugal

Abstract: Overcoming performance anomalies without server downtimes is of the utmost importance in videostreaming services. These services have large user abandonment costs when failures occur after users watch a significant part of a video. Reboot is the most popular and effective technique for overcoming performance anomalies but requires long server warm-up times. During warm-up, the server is unavailable or provides limited capacity to process end-users' requests. This paper presents a recovery technique for performance anomalies in HTTP streaming services, which relies on container-based virtualisation to implement an efficient multiphase server reboot technique that minimises the service downtime. The recovery process includes analysis of variance of request-response times to delimit the server warm-up period, after which the server is running at its full capacity. Experimental results show that the virtual container recovery process completes in 72 seconds, which contrasts with the 434 seconds required for a full operating system recovery. Both recovery types generate service downtimes imperceptible to end-users.

Keywords: performance anomalies; reboot; recovery; adaptive bitrate; video-streaming; self-healing; autonomic computing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2017.086544

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2017 Vol.10 No.4/5, pp.403 - 414

Received: 22 Sep 2015
Accepted: 05 Apr 2016
Published online: 12 Sep 2017 *

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