Web Performance Tuning

Chapter 12. Server Operating System

The operating system sits between the hardware and the web server software, translating the web server’s request for services into hardware actions and delivering data from the hardware back up to the web server. The server hardware has a maximum performance that is fixed by its physical specifications. You can approach this maximum performance by appropriate configuration of the operating system. The question for web servers is how to configure the operating system to take requests from the network, find the correct file to return or run the correct program, and push the result back out to the network, all as fast as possible.

Unix and the Origin of the Web

Networking has been central to the development of Unix. Unix was originally developed around 1970 as a research project by AT&T Bell Laboratories, building on multiuser and multitasking ideas from the Multics government research project of the 1960s. Since AT&T was barred from selling software because it was the U.S. telephone monopoly, it allowed universities to use the source code for education and research. The University of California at Berkeley, in particular, continued development on the TCP/IP implementation in the Unix kernel. The Berkeley group introduced enough changes that Unix was for about ten years split into two main camps: Berkeley Unix and AT&T Unix. Around 1988, these were merged into System V Release 4 (SVR4) Unix, but derivatives of the two original camps continue to ...