A Study of Bare PC Web Server Performance for Workloads with Dynamic and Static Content

Abstract

Bare PC applications do not use an operating system or kernel. The bare PC architecture avoids buffer copying, minimizes interrupts, uses a single thread of execution for processing network packets, and incorporates novel scheduling to minimize CPU utilization. We design a bare PC Web server that can serve both dynamic and static content. Measurements of response time, connection time and throughput for workloads containing requests for dynamic and static content indicate that the server has better performance than the Apache and IIS Web servers. For example, the bare PC server has a maximum request rate that is twice that of the Apache and IIS servers when serving dynamic content for small dataset sizes. Furthermore, at capacity the CPU utilization of the bare PC server is 1/5 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">th</sup> that of the other servers. The bare PC server can also sustain a higher maximum request rate for dynamic pages with a given request rate for static pages. The studies demonstrate that the performance of the bare PC server when serving dynamic content is limited only by the latency of the database server.