From Detection to Remediation: A Self-Organized System for Addressing Flash Crowd Problems

A flash crowd event can be characterized by a dramatic increase in requests for a service over a relatively short period of time. Often, these events lead to a loss of service because of the saturation of the target server and associated network resources. This paper presents a set of mechanisms that can be used to make Web servers and associated resources more resilient to flash crowd events. Specifically, the authors present a novel admission control mechanism that uses a detection mechanism they developed in earlier work to adjust the admission rate of HTTP requests to a Web server.