Title: QoS in Web-Servers Team Members: Nitin Gupta and Sandhya Gupta Abstract: All the webservers today consider the incoming connections on equal ground i.e. they provide no means of differentiating the incoming requests nor providing any special treatment to incoming connections. As long as the server is lightly loaded there is not be a large difffernce in the response time but as the server becomes heavily loaded the response times may increase dramatically. There is no doubt in the fact that web-sites (such as Amazon, Yahoo &c) would like to give preferential treatment to their regular customers (generating revenue) and provide faster response time to them over other users who are merely browsing through their website. We don't intend to deal with the problem of identification of these preferred users but instead we will be dealing with the problem that once these preferred users are identified how to provide them with better quality of service. The former problem may be solved by assuming that IP addresses of the customers remain same. The problems that we identified in loaded servers which lead to lower response time are (1) The Accept queue does not distinguish between preferred requests and ordinary request to be serviced. This causes the preferred requests processing to be delayed. In case of loaded servers, these queues may be quite large. (2) There is a need to distinguish the preferred requests over non-preferred ones for allocation of CPU time as well. (3) The outgoing queue should prioritize sending the preferred requests packets in the network. Presently, OS's such as Linux, have only a single queue without any priority. We intend to solve problems (1) & (3) by introducing priority queues where the kernel would be able to de-multiplex packets based on their IP addresses into various service classes. These classes would be user defined. Problem (2) could be solved by having more processes and/or higher priority processes servicing these requests. We intend to study the impact of the suggested solutions above in terms of response time and other related parameters.