Patent ID: 7085837
Filing Date: 2006-08-01
Classification: G06F,G06Q,H04L

Abstract:
1. A method for server allocation in a Web server “farm” based on information regarding future loads to achieve close to greatest possible revenue based on an assumption that revenue is proportional to the utilization of servers and differentiated by customer comprising the steps of: modeling a server allocation problem mathematically; in the model, dividing time into intervals based on an assumption that a site's demand is uniformly spread throughout each such interval; maintaining server allocations fixed for the duration of an interval, servers being reallocated only at the beginning of an interval, and a reallocated server being unavailable for the length of the interval during which it is reallocated providing time to “scrub” an old site (customer data) to which the server was allocated, to reboot the server and to load the new site to which the server has been allocated, each server having a rate of requests it can serve in a time interval and customers share servers only in the sense of using the same servers at different times, but do not use the same servers at the same time; associating each customer's demand with a benefit gained by a service provider in case a unit demand is satisfied and finding a time-varying server allocation that would maximized benefit gained by satisfying sites' demand; and reducing to a minimum-cost network flow problem and solving in polynomial time.