Measurement, analysis and performance improvement of the Apache Web server

Author

Hu, Yiming ; Nanda, Ashwini ; Yang, Qing

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Rhode Island Univ., Kingston, RI, USA

fYear

1999

fDate

10-12 Feb 1999

Firstpage

261

Lastpage

267

Abstract

Performance of Web servers is critical to the success of many corporations and organizations. However, very few results have been published that quantitatively study the server behavior and identify the performance bottlenecks. In this paper we measured and analyzed the behavior of the popular Apache Web server on a uniprocessor system and a 4-CPU SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processor) system running the IBM AIX operating system. Using the AIX built-in tracing facility, we obtained detailed information on kernel events and system activities while running Apache driven by the SPECweb96 and the WebStone benchmarks. After quantitatively identifying the performance bottlenecks, we proposed and implemented 6 techniques that improve the throughput of Apache by 61%. These techniques are general purpose and can be applied to other Web servers as well

Keywords

search engines; software performance evaluation; Apache Web server; SPECweb96; WebStone benchmarks; performance; performance bottlenecks; server behavior; uniprocessor system; Benchmark testing; Explosives; File servers; Kernel; Network servers; Operating systems; Performance analysis; Throughput; Time measurement; Web server;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Performance, Computing and Communications Conference, 1999 IEEE International

Conference_Location

Scottsdale, AZ

ISSN

1097-2641

Print_ISBN

0-7803-5258-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/PCCC.1999.749447

Filename

749447