A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, School of Advanced Technologies

Thesis (M.Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology

The widespread use of the World Wide Web and related applications places interesting performance demands on network servers. The ability to measure the effect of these demands is important for tuning and optimizing the various software components that make up a Web server. This work examines pitfalls that one encounters when measuring Web server capacity using a synthetic workload and describes WebMT, a tool for measuring Web server performance. It provides ability for generating various HTTP workloads and for measuring server performance. The problem of the approach is to generate client request-rates that exceed the capacity of the server being tested even for short periods of time. To solve this problem, we used a method for Web traffic generation that can generate bursty traffic (Banga and Druschel, 1997) with peak loads that exceed the capacity of the server. Finally, we measured performance of particular Web server using the proposed method. The results emphasize the important role of operating system implementation that are designed to perform well when running on Web server, in addition to the server application, which consumes a low resource requirement.