Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

28.8. Scalability issues

Web servers can come under extremely heavy load, for example when a news event breaks millions of people may turn to the web for immediate information and images. In general, because of the scale of the web, any website that provides a useful service may have very large numbers of client requests arriving effectively simultaneously. Designers therefore need to consider how server architectures can scale to handle large numbers of simultaneously ongoing client requests. One approach is to use server clusters, deploying a number of machines to provide the service. Another is to use mirror sites where a whole website is replicated. Users are not aware of server clusters but they are aware of the different server address ...