High-Performance Memory-Based Web Servers: Kernel and User-Space Performance
Philippe Joubert, Robert B. King, Richard Neves, Mark Russinovich, John M. Tracey, Robert B. King Ý, Mark Russinovich Þ, John M. Tracey Ü · 2007
Web server performance has steadily improved since the inception of the World Wide Web. We observe performance gains of two orders of magnitude between the original process-based Web servers and today's threaded Web servers. Commercial and academic Web servers achieved much of these gains using new or improved event-notification mechanisms and techniques to eliminate reading and copying data, both of which required new operating system primitives. More recently, experimental and production Web servers began integrating HTTP processing in the TCP/IP stack and providing zero copy access to a kernel-managed cache. These kernelmode Web servers improved upon newer user-mode Web servers by a factor of two to six.