Addressing Web Service Performance by Replication at the Operating System Level

This paper evaluates replication possibilities for Web services at the operating system level and how they affect Web service performance. This is done in the context of architectural translucency - an approach that defines layers in a service-oriented architecture and states that similar measures have different implications on nonfunctional properties when applied at different layers in different ways. The observed layer here is the operating system. The work presents current request processing techniques and how they are implemented in a typical platform for Web services (Windows Server 2003, IIS and .NET). It then proposes two ways to replicate Web services - per-process replication and per-thread replication and techniques to configure them on the selected platform. The case study demonstrates the feasibility of the concept with performance advantages of up to 50%.