SETIT 2009

th
5 International Conference: Sciences of Electronic,
Technologies of Information and Telecommunications
March 22-26, 2009 – TUNISIA

Mixed Neural and Feedback Controller for Apache Web

Server
R. FONTAINE*, P. LAURENCOT* and A. AUSSEM**
*LIMOS, Blaise Pascal University, Clermont Ferrand II, 63173 Aubière Cedex, France
fontaine@isima.fr
patrice.laurencot@isima.fr

**PRISMa, Claude Bernard University, Lyon I France

alexandre.aussem@univ-lyon1.fr

Abstract: Overload control mechanism is used to protect a web server from excessive load during traffic peaks and
involves techniques of predictive control with limited local information. Four main types of overload control can be
identified: Load balancing, content adaptation, Scheduling and Admission control. This paper presents a Neural Model
based Feedback control approach to keep the mean response time of a web server close to the service level
specification. Implementing in a real server, we show that both neural network and feedback control leads better
tracking of QoS specification than with feedback control only or neural model based feed forward control only.
Key words: Feedback control, feed forward control, neural network controller, web server

INTRODUCTION
Since recent years, the Internet end users have
experienced phenomenal growth. According to
Webstat1, the Internet end users were more than one
billion in March 2007. Some users complain about a
long response time observed during peak times. This
long response time does not necessarily depend on too
little bandwidth or too slow clients. Instead, the
bottleneck is often the web server system itself. As a
lot of requests are submitted, the web server has to
deal with more requests than it is designed to, and so it
may become overloaded. Overload control mechanism
can be used to resolve this problem. There are four
main types of overload control: admission control,
content adaptation, load balancing and scheduling. In
this work, we are interested in Admission Control
mechanism. The Admission Control Mechanism
rejects some requests whenever the incoming traffic is
too high and in this way, it maintains an acceptable
response time. The structure of a Admission Control
mechanism contains in general three modules: the
Gate, the Controller and the Monitor. The Controller
can be designed in a variety of ways as described in
[KjB 97]: static controller, step controller, on-off
controller or PID-controller. Generally, it is the last
1
http://www.webstat.net
one that is the most widely used like controller for the
Admission Control Mechanism.
In previous related works, different methods were
proposed to improve the quality of service in the web
server. In [CTJ 01], a scheduling algorithm for an
Apache web server was introduced using system
identification methods and linear control theory.
Queue length control with priorities was developed in
[NbR 99]. On-off load control mechanism regulating
the admission of client sessions was developed in [LcP
00]. In [TvP 02], a control mechanism that combines a
load control for the CPU with a queue length control
for the network interface was proposed. In [PbS 85], a
PID-controller was used in an admission control
mechanism for a web server using linear control
theory. An Admission Control mechanism for server
systems using non-linear control theory was designed
in [MaM 03]. To find optimal controller parameters for
a PID-controller, [TfC 00] and [TfK 02] have modeled
the web server to deal mostly with static files (i.e., if
dynamic content is statistically insignificant or served
from a separate server). In [YNJ 02], the parameters
(i.e. KeepAlive time and MaxClients) of an Apache
web sever are dynamically allocated using feedback
controller. The goal is to keep the system’s CPU and
memory utilization stabilized at the desired reference
value. In recent paper [RPA 07], we developed a neural
based admission control of Apache. A static controller
is used for fixing acceptance arrival rate to guarantee a
server mean response time using neural network.

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SETIT2009
While neural network model and feedback control
have been used in isolation in many contexts to
provide performance guarantees, in this paper we
propose a new approach which combines both neural
model and feedback control to achieve a service level
based response time specification for a web server. We
will show by experimentations that the combined
framework, neural and feedback model leads to better
tracking of QoS specification than with feedback
control only or neural model based feed forward
control only.
This paper is structured as follows: section 1
describes the architecture of the neural based feedback
control; section 2 covers a neural network controller
for Apache web server. In section 3, we present the
feedback controller. Section 4 shows how to
implement and validate our approach. The conclusion
is given in section 5.
1. Neural based feedback control
Architecture
Admission control mechanisms have been for a
long time already studied for telecommunication
systems. This mechanism is intended to prevent the
system from becoming overloaded by rejecting some
visitors. This permits to avoid the overload of the
system which can lead to its failure. The fact is that it
is better to have a deteriorated service than no service
at all.
Apache
Request
Server
λ connection. The server software is the Apache 1.3
MaxClients
Neural N
+ MaxClients
MaxClients
Response time
Feedback
Ref Response time control
Measured Mean response time
Figure 1. Neural Based feedback control architecture
Figure 1 shows the Neural based feedback control
architecture. The neural model is used for computing
the value of the apache parameter MaxClients to
achieve a specified mean response time given the
currently observed average request arrival rate. The
feedback controller loop module compares the actual
server mean response time achieved to the desired
average and adjusts MaxClients to ensure that the
desired mean response time is maintained. The Neural
model and feedback components operate concurrently
in a complementary manner as shown in Figure 1.
Apache is structured as a pool of worker processes
monitored by a master. Each worker process is
responsible for handling communication with the web
clients and can handle at most one connection at a
time. The MaxClients parameter limits the size of the
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worker pool, thereby imposing a limitation on the
processing capacity of the server. A higher MaxClients
value allows Apache to process more client requests
but if it is too large, there is excessive resource
utilization that increases considerably the server mean
response time.
Periodically, the neural model estimates the arrival
rate λ online and computes MaxClients so that the
mean response time is maintained near the desired
value. The feedback controller compares then the
measured mean response time obtained previously
with the reference mean response time (shown as Ref
Response time in Figure 1.). The difference, (shown as
∆ Response time in the Figure 1.), is the error to be
corrected by the controller via MaxClients adjustment
∆ DeltaMaxClients as shown in Figure 1.
2. The Neural module
This section describes how we have proceeded to
obtain the neural model controller and how it works.
2.1. The data sets
The data sets used for training and validation
purposes were obtained by experimentation using
HTTPERF web benchmark tool.
We used a group of 4 NIC (and so 4 trunk Ethernet
channels) to avoid the network being bottlenecked.
The document request from the client is sent to the
Apache server. We used one server computer which
has the following characteristics: Pentium III 800
MHz processor, 512 Mbytes of main memory,
FreeBSD2 5.1 with TCP/IP and Ethernet network
from Apache Software Foundation. According to
Netcraft3 survey, Apache is the most widely used web
server and gives more stability and performance when
coupled with FreeBSD operating system. The four
computers representing the clients have the same
characteristics: Pentium IV 2.4 GHz processor, 128
Mbytes of main memory, Linux4 Mandrake 9.2 with
TCP/IP and Ethernet network connection. The client
software is a HTTP load generator, the HTTPERF.
The influence of the variation of the arrival traffic
λ, the two optimization parameters of FreeBSD
Operating System (kern.maxusers and
kern.ipc.somaxconn) and the parameter of Apache
(MaxClients) on the server mean response time was
investigated. Their modification has an impact on the
server mean response time. We varied then
successively kern.maxusers, kern.ipc.somaxconn and
MaxClients. For each combination of these
parameters, the benchmark tool was launched during
five minutes by varying the arrival traffic λ and it
helped us observe the server mean response time.
Thanks to this experimentation, we have collected
2
http://www.freebsd.org
3
http://www.netcraft.com
4
http://www.linux.org
SETIT2009
5616 examples which were used as data sets during
the training process.
2.2. Training set-up
To speed up the training process, the data sets must
be normalized in the (0,1) interval.
An MLP feed-forward neural network with a
single hidden layer was trained with resilient back-
Propagation algorithm, proposed in [RiH 92] and [RiH
93], using the Stuttgart Neural Network Simulator
(SNNS5). The neural network has 4 input neurons, a
single hidden layer and a single output neuron. The
number of neurons in the hidden layer was
investigated by testing from 2 to 32 neurons. The
performances of the neural network were measured
using the cross validation method and the Normalized
Mean Squared Error (NMSE). We used 80% of the
data sets for the training sets and 20% for the
validation sets. The optimal learning parameters of
RPROP algorithm were obtained using “batchman”
script integrated in SNNS package. Table 1
summarizes the performances of the different
architectures.
Architecture NMSE
4/2/1 4,4374.10-2
4/4/1 8,7165.10-3
4/8/1 8,1414.10-4
4/16/1 6,8486.10-4
4/32/1 7,313.10-4
Table 1. The performances of the different
architectures
To avoid learning by heart, we chose the simple
architecture possible for the neural network.
The final architecture is then composed of 4 input
neurons, 16 hidden neurons and 1 output neuron.
2.3. Neural Network Recuperating.
In order to implement the neural model in the real
system, the Neural Network obtained from the training
process must be converted to a C function. We used
the snns2c tool from SNNS package to convert Neural
Network to C.
2.4. The Neural Based feedforward controller
Although closed-loop control has considerable
appeal, its use requires, among other things, online
measurement and careful design to ensure desirable
system properties, especially stability, accuracy, short
settling times, and small overshoot. An alternative is
open-loop control, a technique that avoids using the
measured output to adjust the control input. Open-loop
control is sometimes referred to as feedforward
control. Figure 2 depicts such a system. The
feedforward controller uses the reference input (and
sometimes the disturbance input) to determine the
setting of the control input needed to achieve the
desired measured output; the measured output is not
5
http://www-ra.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/SNNS/
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used.
Noise
Input
Disturbance
Input
Reference Control
Input Feedforward Input Target
Controller System
Figure 2. Feedforward controller architecture
In this work, we used the neural network obtained
from section 2.1.3 as a feedforward controller. As the
workloads are time varying, MaxClients may need to
be adjusted to maintain the desired server mean
response time. For each control interval, the neural
based controller estimates the arrival rate λ online.
Next, the neural module finds out the value of
MaxClients which correspond to the desired mean
response time. MaxClients must then be adjusted to its
new value for the next interval.
3. The feedback controller module
This section describes the methodology used for
designing feedback controller and applies it to the web
server.
3.1. Design Methodology
The controller uses a proportional integral (PI)
controller. Because of its robustness, PI control is
widely used in mechanical engineering and process
control. PI control process operates according to the
following control law:
k −1
u ( k ) = K p e( k ) + K I ∑ e ( j ) (1)
j =1
Where u(k) is a tuning parameter and e(k)=r(k)-
y(k) is the control error. For Apache system, r(k) is the
desired mean response time (REP*), and y(k) is the
measured metric (REP).
PI control has two parameters: Kp, the proportional
gain , and KI, the integral gain. The proportional term
is used to increase the speed of response and the
integral term is used to eliminate any steady-state
error.
To design a PI controller, Kp and KI must be set to
achieve the desired control specification. In order to
calculate these two parameters, Apache server must be
first modeled.
3.2. Modelling apache
This section describes the approach to modelling
Apache, which is based on statistical (black box)
models to quantify the relationship between the tuning
parameter MaxClients and the metric mean response
time (REP).
An empirical approach is used to quantify the
relationship between the control input, MaxClients
SETIT2009
and the system outputs, the mean response time. The
control input was varied in a manner so that two
properties are satisfied. First, the input signal should
be persistently exciting; it should contain enough
frequency content to excite all of the dynamics of the
system. Discrete sine wave is used for the input
control, MaxClients. This is done so that there are
both high frequency components and low frequency
components. Figure 3. plots the data, the response
time from the server run using the discrete sine wave
as the control inputs.
Figure 3. Experimental data with discrete sine wave
The next step is now to find the relationship
between MaxClients and REP from the data collected
previously.
There are a number of methods available in the
construction of a model that captures the relationship
between MaxClients and REP. We chose to fit a linear
time invariant (ARX) model to the data. The form of
the linear model found is shown in equation (2) :
REP(k+1)=0.532REP(k)+0.0002MaxClients(k) (2)
REP(k) denotes the average value of the mean
response time over the time interval k.
The linear model was validated using R² which is
the indicator of variability explained by the model.
var( y − ɵy )
R2 = 1 − (3)
var( y )
Where var(y) is the variance of the REP(k). R²
ranges from 0 to 1. A value of 0 means that the model
does no better than using the mean value of REP to
estimate REP(k). A value of 1 suggests a perfect fit. In
this work we found R²=0.96 for REP.
3.3. Parameters estimation using Pole Placement
To design a PI controller, KP and KI must be set to
achieve the desired control specification, such as zero
steady-state error and small settling times. A
commonly used approach to controller design is pole
placement, in which the closed-loop system poles are
chosen to meet some desired criteria. The steps in pole
placement control design are outlined below.
1. Specify the desired transient performance (e.g.,
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the settling time) of the closed loop system.
2. Determine the required closed loop pole
locations from the performance specifications. For
a desired settling time of ts with a sampling time
of T, the closed-loop poles must all have a
magnitude less than e-4/ts [JDY 04]. For zero
steady-state error, KI must be nonzero.
3. Derive the closed loop system model from the
open loop system model and the control law.
4. Calculate the control gains by matching the
closed loop system model with the desired closed
loop poles. Since the desired closed loop are
available from Step 2 and the poles of the closed
loop system model can be found as functions of
KP and KI in Step 3, the control gains can be
found by equating these and solving for KP and
KI.
From experimentations, the settling time of REP is
set to 60 seconds. Following the previous four steps,
we can find reference values of KP and KI. Next we
used MATLAB to optimize these values using the step
response. We found KP =800 and KI=250. Figure 4
plots the step response of the model. It corresponds
well to the desired settling time specification. Below is
the MATLAB code used to obtain the step response.
kp=800;
ki=250;
Gc=tf([ki 0],[1 -1],-1)+kp;
Gp=tf(0.0002,[1 -0.5992],-1);
Gcl=feedback(Gc*Gp,1)
t=0:1:150;
step(Gcl,t);
In the code, Ge, Gp, and Gcl are respectively the
transfer function of the PI controller, the process and
the feedback closed loop function.
Figure 4. Step response of PI controller
4. Implementation and validation
In this section we report the experiments we
carried out to implement and validate the Neural based
feedback controller
4.1. Experimental setup
We implemented the neural model and integrated it
with our controller instrumented Apache web server.
SETIT2009

The C function codes of Neural Network Controller not only determines the length of time between
are implemented and compiled on the server machine successive updates of the MaxClients parameter, but
also the lengths of time system outputs REP are
The server has the following characteristics:
averaged over.
Pentium III 800 MHz processor, 512 Mbytes of main
memory, FreeBSD 5.1 with TCP/IP and Ethernet
network connection. The server software is the
Apache 1.3 from Apache Software Foundation. It is
the most widely used web server and gives more
stability and performance system, see Netcraft survey.
The computers representing the clients have the
same characteristics, in particular: Pentium IV 2.4GHz
processor, 256 Mbytes of main memory, Linux
Mandrake 9.2 with TCP/IP and Ethernet network
connection. The client computers were installed with a
HTTP load generator, the HTTPERF. During
experimentations, we modified the HTTPERF source
code so that the traffic load changes dramatically as Figure 6. Server mean response time with and without
shown in Figure 5. feedforwad neural control

Figure 5. Traffic load generated by HTTPERF Figure 7. Server mean response time with PI control
Two modules were added to Apache. The first
module is in charge of estimates online the average
arrival request rate. The second runs a high-priority
loop that listens to the web server’s TCP socket and
accepts incoming connection request. It also time-
stamps and records the server mean response time.
The response time is the difference between accepting
connection and its reply.
In the default version of Apache, MaxClients
parameter cannot be changed dynamically. As a result,
we modified its source to enable real-time control.

4.2. Experimental Results
In order to evaluate the performance of the neural
based feedback control approach, we compared its
performance with that of feedback controller only and
neural network only respectively. The goal of the
system is to provide the mean response time
guarantee. We carried out three experiments. The first
experiment shows the effect of implementing the
neural controller only into Apache. The second
presents the effect of integrating feedback controller.
The last experiment combines both neural and
feedback controller and shows the effect of the mixed
controller. In all experiments, the desired mean
response time is set to 400ms and the input load
pattern is shown in Figure 5. By experimentation, the
sample time was fixed to 5 seconds. The sample time
Figure 8. Server mean response time with both neural
and PI control
In Figure 6, we show the server mean response
time with and without neural control. Without control
mechanism, we observe as expected that the response
time follows the rhythm of the input load. The mean
response time increases with the traffic load. With
neural control, the response time is relatively stable
due to the action of the control mechanism.
In Figures 7 and 8, we explore respectively the
effect of adding feedback control and both neural and
feedback controls to the server mean response time.
In order to compare the performance of the three
controllers, neural control only, feedback control only
and both neural and feedback control, we used the

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SETIT2009
aggregate of the squared errors between the desired
and the actual mean response time over the duration of
the experiment. The smaller is the aggregate error, the
better is the convergence.
Table 2 summarizes the results.
Controller Neural PI PI and Neural
Aggregate square error 23 6,45 3,17
Table 2. Aggregate square error
Using neural model feed forward control alone, a
large steady state error develops and fluctuation is also
quite large (Figure 6.). PI controller decreases both
steady state and fluctuation (Figure 7.) but it is much
better in presence of neural control (Figure 8.). This is
because the neural controller is able to supply an
approximate output that achieves a mean response
time value close to the set point. The PI controller
therefore has to handle the residual error only.
Our experimental evaluation presents the
advantages of integrating a neural model with
feedback controller to achieve Quality of Service
guarantees in a web server, in particular with Apache.
5. Conclusion
We proposed an Apache overload control based on
both neural and feedback control mechanism. The
neural model was an MLP feed-forward neural
network trained using Resilient back propagation
algorithm. The performance of the neural network was
tested using cross validation method and NMSE.
For each control interval time, neural controller
predicts the server mean response time as a function of
arrival traffic, some FreeBSD operating system and
the actual MaxClients value. For the next interval
MaxClients was adjusted to keep the server mean
response time close to the desired mean response time.
The feedback controller was a PI controller. It was
a SISO (Single In Single Out) model. The input
control was MaxClients and the output control was the
Apache mean response time. For each interval control,
MaxClients was adjusted as function of the measured
server mean response time, parameters gain KI and KP
using the PI controller law. The new value of
MaxClients was applied to the next interval.
The neural based feedback controller was
validated and implemented on a machine with Apache.
Measurements were made to examine the server mean
response time. The experiments illustrate that neural
control only and feedback control only mechanism
work as expected but the two components have
complementary strengths, jointly offering more robust
tracking of performance set points in the presence of
widely unpredictable load.
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