Author(s)

Sarah Tasneem, Reda Ammar

Computer Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA..
Math and Computer Science, Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic, USA.

With the rapid expansion of the Internet, Web servers have played a major role in accessing the enormous mass of Web pages to find the information needed by the user. Despite the exponential growth of the WWW, a very negligible amount of research has been conducted in Web server performance analysis with a view to improve the time a Web server takes to connect, receive, and analyze a request sent by the client and then sending the answer back to client. In this paper, we propose a multi-layer analytical approach to study the web server performance. A simple client-server model is used to represent the WWW server in order to demonstrate how to apply the proposed approach. We developed a systematic, analytical methodology to quantify the communication delay and queuing overhead in a distributed web server system. The approach uses the Computation Structure Model to derive server processing time required to process a request sent from a client and queueing model to analyze the communication between the clients and the server.

Web Server; CSM; Performance Modeling; Performance Analysis; Distributed Systems; Queueing Model

S. Tasneem and R. Ammar, "Performance Study of a Distributed Web Server: An Analytical Approach," Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, Vol. 5 No. 11, 2012, pp. 855-863. doi: 10.4236/jsea.2012.511099.