Mini Web Server Clusters for HTTP Request Splitting

HTTP request splitting is a new concept where the TCP connection and data transfer phases are dynamically split between servers without using a central dispatcher or load balancer. Splitting is completely transparent to the client and provides security due to the inaccessibility and invisibility of the data servers. We study the performance of mini Web server clusters with request splitting. With partial delegation in which some requests are split, throughput is better, and response times are only marginally less than for an equivalent non-split system. For example with partial delegation, for a four-node cluster with a single connection server and three data servers serving 64 KB files, and for a three-node cluster with two connection servers and a single data server serving 4 KB files, the respective throughput improvements over non-split systems are 10% and 22%, with only a marginal increase in response time. In practice, the throughput improvement percentages will be higher and response time gaps will be lower since we ignore the overhead of a dispatcher or load balancer in non-split systems. Although these experiments used bare PC Web servers without an operating system/kernel for ease of implementation, splitting and clustering may also be implemented on conventional systems.