Dynamic Web pages: performance impact on Web servers

The World Wide Web has experienced phenomenal growth over the past few years, placing heavy load on Web servers. Today’s Web servers also process an increasing number of requests for dynamic pages, making server load even more critical. The performance of Web servers delivering static pages is well studied and well understood. However, there has been little analytic or empirical study of the performance of Web servers delivering dynamic pages. This paper focuses on experimentally measuring and analyzing the performance of the three dynamic Web page generation technologies: CGI, FastCGI and Servlets. In this paper, we present experimental results for Web server performance under CGI, Fast CGI and Servlets. Then, we develop a multivariate linear regression model and predict Web server performance under some typical dynamic requests. We find that CGI and FastCGI perform effectively the same under most low‐level benchmarks, while Servlets perform noticeably worse. Our regression model shows the same deficiency in Servlets’ performance under typical dynamic Web page requests.