[cap-talk] Price of resource accountability

[Sam Mason]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 09:47:20AM +1000, James A. Donald wrote:
> Neal H. Walfield wrote:
> > This question makes the assumption that resource accountability is
> > primarily useful for limiting denial of service attacks.  I think this
> > is a weak justification for resource accountability.  A stronger
> > justification, I think, is that good resource accountability means
> > that it is possible to more accurately enforce resource distribution
> > policies, and provide information to resource principals about the
> > amount of resources available to them.  This is one of the main
> > observations of the Viengoos work.
> 
> Google's new browser is supposed to report on which web pages are 
> sucking up unreasonable amounts of resources.

But that's just within a single (multi-process) application.  Operating
system level accountability, which is what I think Neal is interested
in, would allow you to express policies between applications that don't
have a prearranged accounting scheme between themselves.

Operating system level resource accounting wouldn't obviate the need for
finer application level accounting however, as you note.

> I often have a very large 
> number of web pages open at once, making it difficult to determine which 
> web page is bringing my system to a grinding halt.
> 
> Having determined what web site is responsible, I would promptly 
> blacklist it.

Wouldn't it be nicer to say that, by default, each tab is given an
equal proportion of a 100KB/s network stream but specific tabs would be
allowed more.  For example, tabs where the main page is from youtube
would get more bandwidth to pull data from any address, but other tabs
wouldn't be able to pull data from youtube any faster than any other
address.


  Sam