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Improving the scalability of a multi-core web server

Published: 21 April 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Improving the performance and scalability of Web servers enhances user experiences and reduces the costs of providing Web-based services. The advent of Multi-core technology motivates new studies to understand how efficiently Web servers utilize such hardware. This paper presents a detailed performance study of a Web server application deployed on a modern 2 socket, 4-cores per socket server. Our study show that default, "out-of-the-box" Web server configurations can cause the system to scale poorly with increasing core counts. We study two different types of workloads, namely a workload that imposes intense TCP/IP related OS activity and the SPECweb2009 Support workload, which incurs more application-level processing. We observe that the scaling behaviour is markedly different for these two types of workloads, mainly due to the difference in the performance characteristics of static and dynamic requests. The results of our experiments reveal that with workload-specific Web server configuration strategies a modern Multi-core server can be utilized up to 80% while still serving requests without significant queuing delays; utilizations beyond 90% are also possible, while still serving requests with acceptable response times.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        ICPE '13: Proceedings of the 4th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering
        April 2013
        446 pages
        ISBN:9781450316361
        DOI:10.1145/2479871
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        Published: 21 April 2013

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        Author Tags

        1. multi-core servers
        2. system scalability
        3. web servers performance

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        ICPE '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 64 submissions, 44%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 252 of 851 submissions, 30%

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        • (2020)PRIMA: Subscriber-Driven Interference Mitigation for Cloud ServicesIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2019.296161317:2(958-971)Online publication date: Jun-2020
        • (2019)The Impact of Event Processing Flow on Asynchronous Server EfficiencyIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2019.2938500(1-1)Online publication date: 2019
        • (2018)Subscriber-Driven Cloud Interference Mitigation for Network Services2018 IEEE/ACM 26th International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS)10.1109/IWQoS.2018.8624154(1-6)Online publication date: Jun-2018
        • (2017)IRISProceedings of the 8th ACM/SPEC on International Conference on Performance Engineering10.1145/3030207.3030225(143-154)Online publication date: 17-Apr-2017
        • (2015)Performance Impact of Batching Web-Application Requests Using Hot-Spot Processing on GPUsProceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium10.1109/IPDPS.2015.64(989-999)Online publication date: 25-May-2015
        • (2015)Performance Comparison of Web Servers with Different ArchitecturesProceedings of the 2015 Third IEEE Workshop on Hot Topics in Web Systems and Technologies (HotWeb)10.1109/HotWeb.2015.11(37-42)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2015
        • (2014)Understanding, modelling, and improving the performance of web applications in multicore virtualised environmentsProceedings of the 5th ACM/SPEC international conference on Performance engineering10.1145/2568088.2568102(197-207)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2014
        • (2014)Wide area tentative scaling (WATS) for quick response in distributed cloud computing2014 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)10.1109/INFCOMW.2014.6849164(31-36)Online publication date: Apr-2014
        • (2014)Greening web servers: A case for ultra low-power web serversInternational Green Computing Conference10.1109/IGCC.2014.7039157(1-8)Online publication date: Nov-2014
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