Analysis of Compute Vs Retrieve Intensive Web Applications and Its Impact On The Performance Of A Web Server

摘要

The World Wide Web (WWW) has undergone remarkable change over the past few years, placing substantiallyheavy load on Web servers. Today’s web servers host web applications that demand high computationalresources. Also some applications require heavy database retrieval processing, making server load even morecritical. In this paper, performance of Apache web server running compute and retrieve-intensive web workloadsis analyzed. Workload files implemented in three dynamic web programming technologies: PERL, PHP and JavaServlets are used with MySQL acting as a data source. Measurements are performed with the intent to analyzethe impact of application workloads on the overall performance of the web server and determine which webtechnology yields better performance on Windows and Linux platforms. Experimental results depict that for bothcompute and retrieve intensive applications, PHP exhibits better performance than PERL and Java Servlets. Amultiple linear regression model was also developed to predict the web server performance and to validate theexperimental results. This regression model showed that for compute and retrieve intensive web applications,PHP exhibits better performance than Perl and Java Servlets.