MEANS: A Micro-thrEad Architecture for Network Server

Internet applications require high-performance network server architecture. This paper proposes a kind of software architecture for network server, MEANS, which aims at supporting Internet applications. By introducing a new thread abstraction, micro-thread, MEANS upwardly provides the micro-thread environment to programmers, and downwardly accesses the OS services concurrently through traditional thread primitives, and uses the event-driven mechanism to manage and schedule micro-threads, which takes advantage of both multithread and event-driven architecture. Moreover, MEANS is general, scalable, robust and adaptable. By preliminary evaluation, in terms of the concurrence policy, MEANS has features similar to event-driven architecture; and it outperforms multithread architecture in I/O accessing.