Using the Stream Control Transmission Protocol and Multi-core Processors to Improve the Performance of Web Servers

This paper presents the design of a Web server using multi-core processors and the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) as a transport-level protocol for HTTP. The multi-threaded server design takes advantage of the underlying multi-core architecture by defining stream scheduling policies that attempt to improve the performance of the server threads. The server has been implemented by modifying an existing, simple Web server called NullHttpd [19]. The paper presents the performance evaluation of the server and underlines the advantages of using SCTP as a transport protocol and those of defining SCTP stream scheduling policies. The reported results show that SCTP outperforms TCP as a HTTP transport protocol for a Web server running on multi-core processors.