18-845 Individual Project (IP)

Assigned: Thu Jan 16, 2003
Due: 12:30pm, Thu Feb 6, 2003

Note: in the following, $coursedir refers to /afs/ece/class/ece845.

Intro

For this project, you will design and implement your own protocol for serving dynamic Web content. The purpose is to give you some practical context when we study the research issues.

Description

The project has three parts:

Part I: Implement a baseline concurrent Web server in C.
Part II: Design an efficient protocol for serving dynamic content, and then implement an optimized version of the baseline server that uses your protocol.
Part III: Evaluate the performance of your baseline and optimized servers, characterizing the performance improvement of your new server.

Part I: Baseline concurrent server

Here are the requirements for the baseline server:

Implements HTTP/1.1 GET requests for static and dynamic content. (Recall that HTTP 1.1 requires the HOST header in its requests.)
Assumes one connection per request (no persistent connections).
Uses the CGI protocol to serve dynamic content.
Serves HTML (.html), image (.gif and .jpg), and text (.txt) files.
Accepts a single command-line argument: the port to listen on.
Implements concurrency using either threads or I/O multiplexing.

Part II: Optimized concurrent server

The idea here is to improve the performance of your baseline server by replacing the standard CGI protocol with a protocol of your own design. This is entirely open-ended. Anything goes.

There are a number of existing standards for this kind of thing, such as ISAPI (Microsoft), NSAPI (Netscape), and fast-cgi. However, I would encourage you to forget about these and start from first principles. Design something that is simple and fast. A good design is likely to include some combination of dynamic linking, threads, and code caches.

Part III: Evaluation of baseline and optimized servers

In this part, you will evaluate how well your baseline and optimized servers can serve dynamic content. You should report the performance of your baseline and optimized servers as server throughput (requests per second measured on the server). It's up to you to come up with a convincing evaluation methodology.

Handin instructions

Tar up the directory containing your solution in a file called "ANDREWID.tar", where ANDREWID is your Andrew login name, and copy it to $coursedir/ip/handin. You have list and insert privileges only in this directory. If you need to hand in twice, put a number after later handins, e.g., ANDREWID-1.tar, ANDREWID-2.tar, and so on.

Evaluation

Evaluation will be done by a live demo with the TA. Please arrange your demo time with the TA. The projects are open-ended and so is the evaluation. Here are some rough guidelines:

Baseline server (50%). The goal here is just to get it working serving multiple clients concurrently.
Optimized server (50%). The idea here is to come up with a design that attacks the biggest overheads associated with running CGI programs: fork and exec.

Sources of information

Students in a graduate class are expected to debug their own programs. Your instructors are delighted to discuss design issues with you, but please don't ask them to debug your programs.
The 15-213 textbook, known as the CS:APP book, contains all of the information that you need to complete the project, covering dynamic linking, process control, Unix signals, Unix I/O, network programming, and application-level concurrency and synchronization. The E&S Library in Wean Hall has a copy on reserve.
Numerous code examples, including the csapp.c and csapp.h files, and the Tiny Web server, are available from the CS:APP Student Web Site.
Refer to the HTTP 1.1 specification for questions about HTTP.
Volume 1 of Stevens is also an excellent reference for advanced topics in sockets programming.
Use telnet as the client to debug your server.

Last modified: Tue Jan 28 10:30:25 EST 2003