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This paper provides a detailed implementation study of the behavior of web servers serving static requests, where the load fluctuates over time (transient overload). Various external factors are considered including WAN delays and losses, and different client behavior models. We find that performance can be dramatically improved via a kernel-level modification to the web server to change the scheduling policy at the server from the standard FAIR (processor-sharing) schedul-ing to SRPT (Shortest-Remaining-Processing-Time) scheduling. We find that SRPT scheduling induces no penalties. In particular, throughput is not sacrificed and requests for long files expe-rience only negligibly higher response times under SRPT than they did under the original FAIR scheduling.