on Graduate Students An Empirical Study of Technologies to Implement Servers in Java

Over the past few years, mainstream computing has shifted from isolated personal comput-ers to networks of computational devices. As a result the client-server programming model has become increasingly important. These servers often have very strong performance and reliability criteria. We did an empirical study of different server architectures, developed a novel thread-per-connection to event-driven transformation, and developed a performance model to predict server performance under various server architectures. We considered four different server architectures: a thread-per-connection architecture built on a kernel-level thread implementation, a thread-per-connection architecture built on a user-level thread implementation, an automatically generated event-driven architecture, and a thread pooled architecture. Our empirical study consisted of evaluating the different server architectures across a suite of benchmarks consisting of an echo server with different traffic patterns, a time server,