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Performance modeling of an Apache Web server with a dynamic pool of service processes

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Abstract

In the current Internet the performance of service delivery crucially depends on the proper and efficient operation of Web servers. It is determined by their software architecture and characterized by the applied processing model.

Here we consider the Unix software architecture of an Apache Web server with its non-threaded multi-processing module Prefork. We propose a tractable multi-server model to approximate the performance of the load-dependent dynamic behavior of Apache’s resource pool of available HTTP service processes, which has not been done before. Furthermore, we show that this Markovian queueing model can be solved by advanced matrix-geometric methods. Then the efficiently computed performance results of this analytic model are compared with measurements of a real Apache Web server. The outcome clearly indicates that our analytic model can very accurately predict the mean-value performance of Apache under the Prefork policy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Telecommunications, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Magyar tudósok körútja 2, 1111, Budapest, Hungary

    Tien Van Do

  2. Faculty WIAI, Otto-Friedrich-Universität, 96045, Bamberg, Germany

    Udo R. Krieger

  3. Meerut Institute of Engineering and Technology (MIET), Meerut, 250005, India

    Ram Chakka

Authors
  1. Tien Van Do
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  2. Udo R. Krieger
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  3. Ram Chakka
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Udo R. Krieger.

Additional information

U.R. Krieger acknowledges the support by the EU IST-FP6 NoE project “EuroNGI/EuroFGI”.

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Do, T.V., Krieger, U.R. & Chakka, R. Performance modeling of an Apache Web server with a dynamic pool of service processes. Telecommun Syst 39, 117–129 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-008-9116-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-008-9116-y

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