Corresponding Author: T. Andrew Yang Performance Comparison of Database Access over the Internet- Java Servlets vs CGI

Our recent work on database access using Java servlets (see Yang and Kim 1999) focused on the performance metering of sequential versus concurrent connection schemes between the web server and the database server. In this paper, we plan to extend the work by comparing the performance of database access between servlets and CGI scripts in the Internet environment. To guarantee a fair comparison, all the parameters in both sets of experiments are identical, except for the connectivity mechanism between the web server and the database server. The first section of this draft paper gives an introduction to the 3-Tier WWW model and its integration with Java servlets or CGI to enable database connectivity. The section is followed by a discussion of the servlets that we developed to experiment with distributed data access, and the two different types of servlet-database connection schemes (sequential vs concurrent). The findings from the earlier performance metering experiments using Java servlets are then summarized. The configuration of the performance comparison experiments using servlets and CGI are illustrated in the following section. The paper concludes with analysis of the experiments comparing the performance of servlets vs CGI.