Toward a Scalable Distributed WWW Server on Workstation Clusters

✍ Scribed by Daniel Andresen; Tao Yang; Oscar H. Ibarra

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 143 KB
• Volume: 42
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0743-7315
• DOI: 10.1006/jpdc.1997.1305

✦ Synopsis

In this paper, we investigate the issues involved in developing a scalable World Wide Web (WWW) server called SWEB on a cluster of workstations. The objective is to strengthen the processing capabilities of such a server in order to match huge demands in simultaneous access requests from the Internet, especially when these requests involve delivery of large digitized documents. The scheduling component of the system actively monitors the usages of CPU, disk I/O channels and the interconnection network to effectively distribute HTTP requests across processing units to exploit task and I/O parallelism. We analyze the maximum number of requests that can be handled by the system and present several experiments to examine the performance of this system.