18th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'04) - Workshop 8
Experimental Studies of Scalability in Clustered Web Systems
Santa Fe, New Mexico
April 26-April 30
ISBN: 0-7695-2132-0
As the Internet is becoming more robust with the addition of new services such as audio and video streaming, e-commerce, and news casting, the traditional Web server architecture is unable to keep up with the increasing demands and requisites of such new services. This situation has created a need for secure, reliable, highly available, and scalable Web servers that rely on clustering technologies to meet the growth in the user base and offered services. Our work is concerned with scalability and performance of clustered Web systems based on open technologies. In this paper, we present the results of a series of experiments we conducted to benchmark the performance and scalability of a clustered Web system running Apache and Tomcat Web servers. The paper describes the prototyped target cluster and its components; the benchmarking methodology, metrics, and test scenarios; and the performance and scalability test results for up to 12 servers (we can demonstrate scalability issues without going beyond 12 servers). The results demonstrate non-linear scalability. We will use these results to better understand scalability and performance issues in clustered systems. In future work, we aim to design and build linearly scalable Web server platforms within the concept of Next Generation Internet Server study.
Index Terms:
Web Servers, Clusters, Scalability, Performance, Benchmarking
Citation:
Ibrahim Haddad, Greg Butler, "Experimental Studies of Scalability in Clustered Web Systems," ipdps, vol. 9, pp.185b, 18th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'04) - Workshop 8, 2004