Acceptable strategies for improving web server performance
Tim B. Brecht, David Pariag, Louay Gammo · 2004
This paper evaluates techniques for improving the performance of three architecturally different web servers. We study strategies for effectively accepting incoming connections under conditions of high load. Our experimental evaluation shows that the method used to accept new connection requests can significantly impact server performance. By modifying each server’s accept strategy, we improve the performance of the kernel-mode TUX server, the multithreaded Knot server and the event-driven µserver. Under two different workloads, we improve the throughput of these servers by as much as 19 % – 36 % for TUX, 0% – 32 % for Knot, and 39 % – 71 % for the µserver. Interestingly, the performance improvements realized by the usermode µserver allow it to obtain performance that rivals an unmodified TUX server. 1