Parse & Dispatch: Parallelizing the Generation of Dynamic Web Content

The use of dynamically generated Web content is gaining in popularity over traditional static HTML content. Dynamic Web content is generated on the fly according to the instructions embedded in HTML script files. Such instructions generate HTML by carrying out various forms of tasks such as session tracking, database queries and transactions, dynamic image generation, or even fetching information from remote servers. Popular portal and e-commerce Web pages contain a number of tasks that are executed in a serial manner by traditional multithreaded Web servers. In this ongoing work, we propose a parallel approach for dynamic content generation, and elaborate on how it affects the design and performance of Web servers. We have developed a prototype Web server that supports the parallel processing of tasks involved in the dynamic content generation with improved throughput and response time as compared to the classical (serial) approach.