High Performance Servers

The abstractions provided by general-purpose operating systems are a poor match to the needs of high performance servers (e.g., HTTP, NFS, FTP, etc.). As a result, software overheads and inefficient use of resources prevent these servers from delivering the full performance of the underlying hardware (in particular, the network and disks). By developing high-level abstractions that better fit the computing model of server applications, we hope to realize significant performance improvements with no increase in development complexity or reduction in portability.

The first server built using our new abstractions is a HTTP server called Cheetah. We have observed order of magnitude increases in small web document throughput on the same hardware when comparing Cheetah running on an exokernel to Harvest or NCSA running on general-purpose OSs (Ultrix when the platform is a MIPS box and OpenBSD when the platform is an x86 box). Large document throughput increases by a factor of four.

Status

This is work in progress. We published a position paper on a new OS architecture for servers. We also gave a work-in-progress talk at the 1996 OSDI conference. The corresponding abstract and slides are available on-line.