5 Performance Comparison of Server Load Distribution with FTP and HTTP

A Web server’s constraint on the number of pages it can serve simultaneously is largely because of two factors: the bandwidth available and the Web server itself. When a website is popular and if there is only one web server responding to all the incoming HTTP requests for a website it may be possible that the capacity of the web server may not be able to handle high volumes of incoming traffic. The increase in traffic and connections to the website can lead to a point where the upgrading of server hardware will no longer be cost effective. Thus, more servers need to be added to distribute the load among the group of servers. The load distribution among these servers is known as load balancing. In this paper we are analyzing the performance of HTTP network for optimum load balancing using OPNET