A Scalable Web Server Architecture

This paper describes a scalable architecture for Web servers designed to cope with the ongoing increase of the Internet requirements. In the paper, first the drawbacks of the traditional Web server architecture are discussed, and the need for an innovative solution is described. The proposed design addresses two of the parameters that can dramatically impact the performance of Web servers: (1) the need for a powerful data management system to cope with the increase in the complexity of users' requests; and (2) an efficient caching mechanism to reduce the amount of redundant traffic. In this direction, a scalable solution based on distributed database technology to replace the file system is described, and performance test results of the system are provided. This architecture is further extended by a collaborative caching system that builds up an adaptive hierarchy of caches for Web servers, which allows them to keep up with the changes in the traffic generated by the applications they are running. Finally, some improvements to the proposed architecture are addressed. © 2002, Kluwer Academic Publishers.