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

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