Abstract
In this paper we propose a new method of data handling for web servers. We call this method Network Aware Bufiering and Caching (NABC for short). NABC facilitates reduction of data copies in web server’s data sending path, by doing three things: (1) Layout the data in main memory in a way that protocol processing can be done without data copies (2) Keep a unified cache of data in kernel and ensure safe access to it by various processes and kernel and (3) Pass only the necessary meta data between processes so that bulk data handling time spent during IPC can be reduced. We realize NABC by implementing a set of system calls and an user library. The end product of the implementation is a set of APIs specifically designed for use by the web servers. We port an in house web server called SWEET, to NABC APIs and evaluate performance using a range of workloads both simulated and real. The results show a very impressive gain of 12% to 21% in throughput for static file serving and 1.6 to 4 times gain in throughput for lightweight dynamic content serving for a server using NABC APIs over the one using UNIX APIs.
The author carried out this work while being a full time Master’s student of the Department of Computer Science and Automation, IISc.
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Sen, S., Narahari, Y. (2002). Improving Web Server Performance by Network Aware Data Bu.ering and Caching. In: Sahni, S., Prasanna, V.K., Shukla, U. (eds) High Performance Computing — HiPC 2002. HiPC 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2552. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36265-7_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36265-7_23
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