NCSA´s World Wide Web server: design and performance

To support continued growth, WWW servers must manage a multigigabyte (in some instances a multiterabyte) database of multimedia information while concurrently serving multiple request streams. This places demands on the servers´ underlying operating systems and file systems that lie far outside today´s normal operating regime. Simply put, WWW servers must become more adaptive and intelligent. The first step on this path is understanding extant access patterns and responses. The article examines extant Web access patterns with the aim of developing more efficient file-caching and prefetching strategies.