Prototype implementation and performance evaluation of a QoS-based Web server

With the evolvement of the e-commerce, the Internet is undergoing substantial changes from a communication and browsing infrastructure to a medium for conducting business and selling services. These changes place the Web server at the center of the e-commerce infrastructure with increasing requirements for providing service differentiation and performance assurance. To that end, Web servers must have mechanisms and policies for establishing and supporting quality of service (QoS). In this paper, a Web server prototype with priority based QoS control mechanisms, called QoS Apache, is implemented. A performance testing platform is established, and the performance measurement software httperf is used to test the popular Apache and the QoS Apache. The performance evaluation results show that the QoS Apache server can provide different types of requests with differentiated Web QoS, in comparison with the popular QoS-unaware Apache.