Principles for Developing and Measuring High-performance Web Servers over ATM

High-performance Web servers are essential to meet the growing demands of the Internet. Satisfying these demands requires a thorough understanding of the key factors that affect Web server performance. This paper provides three contributions to the design, implementation, and evaluation of high-performance Web servers. First, we report the results of a comprehensive empirical study of popular high-performance Web servers (such as Apache, Netscape Enterprise, PHTTPD, and Zeus) over high-speed ATM networks. This study illustrates their relative performance and identifies their performance bottlenecks. To measure performance accurately, we developed a new benchmarking technique that subjects Web servers to varying connection frequencies. We found that once network and disk I/O overheads are reduced to negligible constant factors, the main determinant of Web server performance is the concurrency strategy employed by the server. Moreover, no single strategy performs optimally for all load conditions and traffic types. Second, we describe the performance optimizations used to develop our a high-performance optimization used to develop our high-performance Web server: JAWS, JAWS is an object-oriented Web server that was explicitly designed... Read complete abstract on page 2.

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