article

Comparing the performance of web server architectures

Authors:

David R. CheritonAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 41, Issue 3

Pages 231 - 243

https://doi.org/10.1145/1272998.1273021

Published: 21 March 2007 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we extensively tune and then compare the performance of web servers based on three different server architectures. The μserver utilizes an event-driven architecture, Knot uses the highly-efficient Capriccio thread library to implement a thread-per-connection model, and WatPipe uses a hybrid of events and threads to implement a pipeline-based server that is similar in spirit to a staged event-driven architecture (SEDA) server like Haboob.

We describe modifications made to the Capriccio thread library to use Linux's zero-copy sendfile interface. We then introduce the SY mmetric Multi-Processor Event Driven (SYMPED) architecture in which relatively minor modifications are made to a single process event-driven (SPED) server (the μserver) to allow it to continue processing requests in the presence of blocking due to disk accesses. Finally, we describe our C++ implementation of WatPipe, which although utilizing a pipeline-based architecture, excludes the dynamic controls over event queues and thread pools used in SEDA. When comparing the performance of these three server architectures on the workload used in our study, we arrive at different conclusions than previous studies. In spite of recent improvements to threading libraries and our further improvements to Capriccio and Knot, both the event-based μserver and pipeline-based Wat-Pipe server provide better throughput (by about 18%). We also observe that when using blocking sockets to send data to clients, the performance obtained with some architectures is quite good and in one case is noticeably better than when using non-blocking sockets.

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Comparing the performance of web server architectures

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cover image ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Volume 41, Issue 3

EuroSys'07 Conference Proceedings

June 2007

386 pages

ISSN:0163-5980

DOI:10.1145/1272998

Issue’s Table of Contents

EuroSys '07: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2007
March 2007
431 pages
ISBN:9781595936363
DOI:10.1145/1272996

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 21 March 2007

Published in SIGOPS Volume 41, Issue 3

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