Techniques for achieving high performance Web servers

With increasing bandwidth available to the client and the number of users growing at an exponential rate the Web server can become a performance bottleneck. This paper considers the parallelization of requests to Web pages each of which is composed of a number of embedded objects. The performance of systems in which the embedded objects are distributed across multiple backend servers are analyzed. Parallelization of Web requests gives rise to a significant improvement in performance. Replication of servers is observed to be beneficial especially when the embedded objects in a Web page are not evenly distributed across servers. Load balancing policies used by the dispatcher of Web page requests are investigated. A simple round robin policy for backend server selection gives a better performance compared to the default random policy used by the Apache server