JAWS: A Framework for High-performance Web Servers

Developers of communication software face many challenges. Communication software contains both inherent complexities, such as fault detection and recovery, and accidental complexities, such as the continuous re-rediscovery and re-invention of key concepts and components. Meeting these challenges requires a thorough understanding of object-oriented application frameworks and patterns. This paper illustrates how we have applied frameworks and patterns for communication software to develop a high-performance Web server called JAWS. JAWS is an object-oriented framework that supports the configuration of various Web server strategies, such as a Thread Pool concurrency model with asynchronous I/O and LRU caching vs.. a Thread-per-Request concurrency model with synchronous I/O and LFU caching. Because JAWS is a framework, these strategies can be customized systematically and measured both independently and collaboratively to determine the best strategy profiles. Using these profiles, JAWS can statically and dynamically adapt its behavior to deploy the most effective strategies for a given software/hardware platform and workload. JAWS’ adaptive software features make it a powerful application framework for constructing highperformance Web servers.