Energy-Efficient Web Server Load Balancing

Rising energy costs and negative environmental impact resulting from the generation of electricity, particularly when relying on fossil fuels, increase the need for energy-efficient computing. In addition to the optimization of hardware devices, the use of sophisticated software solutions for reducing energy consumption is an important area of current research. Distributing the load among servers for performance optimization is a well-researched area. There is a large potential to reduce energy consumption with similar techniques. In this paper, we examine the application of energy-efficient load-balancing (or unbalancing) strategies for web server requests sent to a web server farm. Single requests usually lead to small fractions of performance need. They are quite suited for strategies relying on the assumption of a fully divisible load. We show that we are able to reduce the power consumption continuously for replays of Wikipedia access traces. Eventually, we are able to reduce the energy consumption in web server farms, significantly.