Performance Anomalies of Advanced Web Server Architectures in Realistic Environments

When we discuss the performance of network servers, simple benchmark tests can mislead us into inaccurate and wrong results. In this paper, we present precise results of Web server performance evaluations on emulated networks whose parameters include network delay and packet loss ratio. We chose three types of target Web servers: Apache, thttpd, and TUX. Their software architectures are largely different from each other and their pros and cons are discussed from a general viewpoint in a number of previous literatures. However, we still found some performance anomalies in the experimental results, which revealed implementation issues in those servers