We investigate the stability condition of redundancy- @math multi-server systems. Each server has its own queue and implements popular scheduling disciplines such as First-Come-First-Serve (FCFS), Processor Sharing (PS), and Random Order of Service (ROS). New jobs arrive according to a Poisson process and copies of each job are sent to @math servers chosen uniformly at random. The service times of jobs are assumed to be exponentially distributed. A job departs as soon as one of its copies finishes service. Under the assumption that all @math copies are i.i.d., we show that for PS and ROS (for FCFS it is already known) sending redundant copies does not reduce the stability region. Under the assumption that the @math copies are identical, we show that (i) ROS does not reduce the stability region, (ii) FCFS reduces the stability region, which can be characterized through an associated saturated system, and (iii) PS severely reduces the stability region, which coincides with the system where all copies have to be served. The proofs are based on careful characterizations of scaling limits of the underlying stochastic process. Through simulations we obtain interesting insights on the system's performance for non-exponential service time distributions and heterogeneous server speeds.
Recent computer systems research has proposed using redundant requests to reduce latency. The idea is to replicate a request so that it joins the queue at multiple servers. The request is considered complete as soon as any one of its copies completes. Redundancy allows us to overcome server-side variability–the fact that a server might be temporarily slow due to factors such as background load, network interrupts, and garbage collection to reduce response time. In the past few years, queueing theorists have begun to study redundancy, first via approximations, and, more recently, via exact analysis. Unfortunately, for analytical tractability, most existing theoretical analysis has assumed an Independent Runtimes (IR) model, wherein the replicas of a job each experience independent runtimes (service times) at different servers. The IR model is unrealistic and has led to theoretical results that can be at odds with computer systems implementation results. This paper introduces a much more realistic model of redundancy. Our model decouples the inherent job size ( @math ) from the server-side slowdown ( @math ), where we track both @math and @math for each job. Analysis within the @math model is, of course, much more difficult. Nevertheless, we design a dispatching policy, Redundant-to-Idle-Queue, which is both analytically tractable within the @math model and has provably excellent performance. Queueing systems with redundancy have received considerable attention recently. The idea of redundancy is to reduce latency by replicating each incoming job a number of times and to assign these replicas to a set of randomly selected servers. As soon as one replica completes service the remaining replicas are cancelled. Most prior work on queueing systems with redundancy assumes that the job durations of the different replicas are i.i.d., which yields insights that can be misleading for computer system design. In this paper we develop a differential equation, using the cavity method, to assess the workload and response time distribution in a large homogeneous system with redundancy without the need to rely on this independence assumption. More specifically, we assume that the duration of each replica of a single job is identical across the servers and follows a general service time distribution. Simulation results suggest that the differential equation yields exact results as the system size tends to infinity and can be used to study the stability of the system.