An experimental study on the performance of WWW servers

There is growing interest in the development of World Wide Web applications targeted at commerce and at production purposes in large scale networks. As a consequence the performance of Web server technology is a key aspect in the design of a Web system. The objective is to fulfil the emerging requirement of giving access to an ever increasing amount of requests for information represented with text, image, audio and video coming from a large number of clients distributed across the Internet. The purpose of this paper is to identify the main components affecting the performance of a Web server and to study the sensitiveness of the performance and the scalability of the server with respect to the behaviour of such components. Finally, available benchmarking tools are used to evaluate a number of commercial and public domain servers.