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Coyote Web Server

Coyote Web Server Benchmarks

July 15, 1998
Updated September 5, 1999

A series of benchmarks has just been completed with the PicLan-IP Coyote Web Server.  This paper discusses the results of these benchmarks.

What this Benchmark Tries to Test

This benchmark is of a single, very simple dynamic page.  The page has a single mv/BASIC insertion point and the absolute minimum of user mv/BASIC code (a single TIMEDATE() function) strictly to demonstate and test the overhead of getting to an active content page.

This benchmark is meant to show the performance of PicLan-IP and Coyote and not to test your application code's impact on performance.  When looking at these numbers, remember that this is the baseline for the web server's performance and your code will subtract from these numbers.

Benchmark HTML Content

The tests were run against a single HTML page that contained a single, and very simple, dynamic HTML page.  A total of nine runs were made with this page ranging from an extremely small 178 bytes up through a size of 204178 bytes.  All of the page sizes had a single TIMEDATE() inserted at the top of the page.  The rest of the page's contents were static.

The RAW Benchmark Numbers

Page size
including HTTP
headers
Hits/sec Bytes/sec
317 84.18 26,684
1,337 81.04 108,347
2,357 78.62 185,299
5,417 70.13 379,874
10,517 59.24 623,045
20,717 43.18 894,516
51,317 22.52 1,155,788
102,317 13.09 1,339,228
204,317 6.49 1,326,734

Conclusion

The benchmark behaved about the way that it was supposed to. This test quite conclusively shows that PicLan-IP and Coyote can be used for high-volume web sites using full T-1 lines or greater.  It should be noted that the test system was far from exotic in terms of hardware configuration and CPU performance (the system had a hardware cost to build of under $1350).

Using the 2.3K page size as an average (which is lower than most sites), Coyote can produce:

We believe that this allows Coyote to drive most large MultiValue internet sites without requiring additional web server acceleration techniques and still leaving plenty of processing power for non-Web MultiValue applications.

The Benchmark Configuration Details

Server System
  • x86 based PC with/
  • Dual Pentium-200 MMX processors
    • TYAN Tomcat-4D Motherboard
      • 512K Pipelined level-two cache
      • Up to 512Meg of main memory cachable
  • 128Meg of EDO DRAM
  • 6.4Gig IDE disk drive
    • 5400 RPM IBM drive
    • TYAN DMA/33 IDE driver
  • Windows NT 4.0 Server
    • Service Pack 3 installed
    • Base services only running
  • Fast Ethernet Network Interface
    • Bay Network Netgear 10/100 PCI Ethernet Adapter
    • uses Digital 21140 chipset
MultiValue Host
  • mv*Base build 1.2.01
  • PicLan-IP Release
  • 2.0.0.116
  • PicLan-IP
    Configuration
  • One IP address
  • SMPT/POP3 Mail services were running
  • Coyote Web
    Server Configuration
    • Standard Configuration
      • Logging was enabled
        • The log file was cleared each test run
        • The log file was sized to prevent it from going into overflow
      • Content cache checking was enabled and set at 30 seconds
      • Four phantom processes were used to process web requests
        • This is the recommended number for a dual-proc system
    Client Test System
    • x86 based PC with/
      • Single Cyrix PR200+ CPU (150MHz core)
      • 512 K Pipelined level-two cache
        • Motherboard only caches first 64Meg of system memory
      • 128Meg of Fast Page Mode DRAM
    • Windows NT Server 4.0
      • Service Pack 3 installed
      • Base services plus DNS and IIS servers running
    • Fast Ethernet Network Interface
      • Compex 10/100 PCI Ethernet Adapter
        • uses Digital 21143 chipset
    Client Test Software
    • WebStone for Windows NT
      • Client helper only.  No supervisor used
      • Cnfigured for 5 threads
        • Non-formal tests were run with 5 to 50 threads
          • No signifigant performance difference was noted
      • No connection errors were encountered on any tests at any thread count

    Mini Benchmarks with D3/Linux new

    Another set of benchmarks was conducted with D3/Linux running on dual-processor 400MHz Linux systems over fast ethernet. With small active-content pages, the system satured at about 212 page hits/second or over 750,000 hits/hour. Even assuming that your application degrades page performance down to 100 hits/second, at 10K pages this is a sustained rate of 1000K bytes/second which is full ethernet speeds or between 6 and 7 dedicated T-1 lines. All with pure dynamic content.

    When tested with large static pages, testing actually saturated fast-ethernet at about 85 Megabits/second so no "real" numbers are being quoted. Regardless, most users will simply not experience server performance problems.

     

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