APPLYING THE PROACTOR PATTERN TO HIGH-PERFORMANCE WEB SERVERS James Hu Irfan Pyarali Douglas C. Schmidt
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[email protected] [email protected] Department of Computer Science, Washington University St. Louis, MO 63130, USA This paper is to appear at the 10th International Confer- 1 INTRODUCTION ence on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems, IASTED, Las Vegas, Nevada, October 28-31, 1998. Computing power and network bandwidth on the Internet has increased dramatically over the past decade. High- speed networks (such as ATM and Gigabit Ethernet) and high-performance I/O subsystems (such as RAID) are be- ABSTRACT coming ubiquitous. In this context, developing scalable Web servers that can exploit these innovations remains a Modern operating systems provide multiple concurrency key challenge for developers. Thus, it is increasingly im- mechanisms to develop high-performance Web servers. portant to alleviate common Web server bottlenecks, such Synchronous multi-threading is a popular mechanism for as inappropriate choice of concurrency and dispatching developing Web servers that must perform multiple oper- strategies, excessive filesystem access, and unnecessary ations simultaneously to meet their performance require- data copying. ments. In addition, an increasing number of operating sys- Our research vehicle for exploring the performance im- tems support asynchronous mechanisms that provide the pact of applying various Web server optimization tech- benefits of concurrency, while alleviating much of the per- niques is the JAWS Adaptive Web Server (JAWS) [1]. JAWS formance overhead of synchronous multi-threading. is both an adaptive Web server and a development frame- This paper provides two contributions to the study of work for Web servers that runs on multiple OS platforms high-performance Web servers.