High Performance Web Servers on Windows NT

This research provides two contributions to the study of highperformance Web servers. First, it outlines the optimizations necessary to build efficient and scalable Web servers and illustrates how we applied some of these optimizations to create JAWS, a highperformance Web server that is explicitly designed to alleviate overheads incurred by existing Web servers on high-speed networks. Second, this paper describes how we have customized JAWS to leverage advanced features of Windows NT, such as asynchronous mechanisms for connection establishment and data transfer. Our work includes performance results which characterize the effectiveness of these techniques under increasing server load conditions. We conclude that optimal performance requires adaptive server behavior.