Web server can refer to either the hardware (the computer) or the software (the computer application) that helps to deliver content that can be accessed through the Internet.[1]
The most common use of web servers is to host web sites but there are other uses such as data storage or running enterprise applications.
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The primary function of a web server is to deliver web pages on the request to clients. This means delivery of HTML documents and any additional content that may be included by a document, such as images, style sheets and scripts.
A client, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initiates communication by making a request for a specific resource using HTTP and the server responds with the content of that resource or an error message if unable to do so. The resource is typically a real file on the server's secondary memory, but this is not necessarily the case and depends on how the web server is implemented.
While the primary function is to serve content, a full implementation of HTTP also includes ways of receiving content from clients. This feature is used for submitting web forms, including uploading of files.
Many generic web servers also support server-side scripting, e.g., Active Server Pages (ASP) and PHP. This means that the behaviour of the web server can be scripted in separate files, while the actual server software remains unchanged. Usually, this function is used to create HTML documents "on-the-fly" as opposed to returning fixed documents. This is referred to as dynamic and static content respectively. The former is primarily used for retrieving and/or modifying information from databases. The latter is, however, typically much faster and more easily cached.
Web servers are not always used for serving the world wide web. They can also be found embedded in devices such as printers, routers, webcams and serving only a local network. The web server may then be used as a part of a system for monitoring and/or administrating the device in question. This usually means that no additional software has to be installed on the client computer, since only a web browser is required (which now is included with most operating systems).
In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee proposed a new project with the goal of easing the exchange of information between scientists by using a hypertext system to his employer CERN. The project resulted in Berners-Lee writing two programs in 1990:
Between 1991 and 1994, the simplicity and effectiveness of early technologies used to surf and exchange data through the World Wide Web helped to port them to many different operating systems and spread their use among socially diverse groups of people, first in scientific organizations, then in universities and finally in industry.
In 1994 Tim Berners-Lee decided to constitute the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to regulate the further development of the many technologies involved (HTTP, HTML, etc.) through a standardization process.
Web servers are able to map the path component of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) into:
For a static request the URL path specified by the client is relative to the web server's root directory.
Consider the following URL as it would be requested by a client:
http://www.example.com/path/file.html
The client's user agent will translate it into a connection to www.example.com with the following HTTP 1.1 request:
GET /path/file.html HTTP/1.1 Host: www.example.com
The web server on www.example.com will append the given path to the path of its root directory. On an Apache server, this is commonly /home/www (On Unix machines, usually /var/www). The result is the local file system resource:
/home/www/path/file.html
The web server then reads the file, if it exists and sends a response to the client's Web browser. The response will describe the content of the file and contain the file itself or an error message will return saying that the file does not exist or is unavailable.
A web server (program) has defined load limits, because it can handle only a limited number of concurrent client connections (usually between 2 and 80,000, by default between 500 and 1,000) per IP address (and TCP port) and it can serve only a certain maximum number of requests per second depending on:
When a web server is near to or over its limits, it becomes unresponsive.
A web server can be either implemented into the OS kernel, or in user space (like other regular applications).
An in-kernel web server (like TUX on GNU/Linux or Microsoft IIS on Windows) will usually work faster, because, as part of the system, it can directly use all the hardware resources it needs, such as non-paged memory, CPU time-slices, network adapters, or buffers.
Web servers that run in user-mode have to ask the system the permission to use more memory or more CPU resources. Not only do these requests to the kernel take time, but they are not always satisfied because the system reserves resources for its own usage and has the responsibility to share hardware resources with all the other running applications.
Also, applications cannot access the system's internal buffers, which causes useless buffer copies that create another handicap for user-mode web servers. As a consequence, the only way for a user-mode web server to match kernel-mode performance is to raise the quality of its code to much higher standards, similar to that of the code used in web servers that run in the kernel. This is a significant issue under Windows, where the user-mode overhead is about six times greater than that under Linux.[2]
At any time web servers can be overloaded because of:
The symptoms of an overloaded web server are:
To partially overcome above load limits and to prevent overload, most popular Web sites use common techniques like:
Below is the most recent statistics of the market share of the top web servers on the internet by Netcraft survey in March 2011.
| Product | Vendor | Web Sites Hosted | Percent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | Apache | 179,720,332 | 60.31% |
| IIS | Microsoft | 57,644,692 | 19.34% |
| nginx | Igor Sysoev | 22,806,060 | 7.65% |
| GWS | 15,161,530 | 5.09% | |
| lighttpd | lighttpd | 1,796,471 | 0.60% |
| Sun Java System Web Server | Oracle | N/A | N/A |
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