Design and Performance Evaluation of a Multimedia Web Server

Abstract Today, vast amounts of text, images, graphics, animation, and even Java applets are being hosted and delivered by the WWW. With rapid advances in audio and video technologies, more and more contents will be encoded and delivered by means of audio/video in addition to texts and images. However, conventional Web servers are designed for data services and hence have no provisions for delivering continuous media such as audio and video. While one can still provide continuous-media services by a separate server in addition to the Web server, extra hardware cost and management complexity are incurred. Moreover, unused capacity in the Web server cannot be utilized even if the continuous-media server is overloaded, and vice versa. This paper presents a design and implementation of a server which integrates continuous-media services with traditional Web services. To resolve disk and network contentions, a simple yet effective fixed-priority scheduler is employed. Experimental results show that the proposed scheduler performs well with non-real-time hardware and operating system platforms.