Fine-Grained Parallelism in Dynamic Web Content Generation: The Parse and Dispatch Approach

Dynamic Web content is gaining in popularity over traditional static HTML as the means of providing Web users with personalized and dynamic information. To enable dynamic content, various technologies have been developed for embedding of script code blocks into static HTML files in order to perform various forms of tasks such as session tracking, bank transactions, financial calculations, products catalog generation, dynamic image generation, or even fetching information from remote servers. In this way, static HTML pages are transformed into dynamic web pages. Typically, dynamic Web pages include a number of tasks that are executed in a serial manner by current Web servers. In this paper, we propose a back-end, finer-grained 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 as compared to the classical (serial) approach.