Improving the performance of CGI compliant database gateways

Abstract

The phenomenal growth that the World Wide Web (WWW) service currently experiences, necessitates the adaptation of legacy information systems like RDBMSs or full-text search systems to HTTP servers. Existing standards for performing this adaptation (i.e. CGI), although well-established, prove highly inefficient throughout periods of heavy load (multiple hits per unit time). In this paper, after reviewing all the relevant mechanisms, we propose a generic architecture which adheres to the existing standards and client/server model and alleviates the performance handicap of classical database gateways. The performance evaluation which was realised as part of this research effort revealed a noteworthy superiority of the proposed architecture with respect to monolithic (non-client/server) CGI based approaches.