APPLYING THE PROACTOR PATTERN TO HIGH-PERFORMANCE WEB SERVERS
James C. Hu, Irfan Pyarali, Douglas C. Schmidt · 1998
Modern operating systems provide multiple concurrency mechanisms to develop high-performance Web servers. Synchronous multi-threading is a popular mechanism for developing Web servers that must perform multiple operations simultaneously to meet their performance requirements. In addition, an increasing number of operating systems support asynchronous mechanisms that provide the benefits of concurrency, while alleviating much of the performance overhead of synchronous multi-threading. This paper provides two contributions to the study of high-performance Web servers. First, it examines how synchronous and asynchronous event dispatching mechanisms impact the design and performance of JAWS, which is our high-performance Web server framework. The results reveal significant performance improvements when a proactive concurrency model is used to combine lightweight concurrency with asynchronous event dispatching. In general, however, the complexity of the proactive concurrency model makes it ...