Design and Performance Evaluation of a Multimedia Web Server

With rapid advances in audio and video technologies, more and more content will be encoded and delivered Today, vast amounts of text, images, graphics, animation, and even Java applets are being hosted and delivered by the by means of audio/video in addition to texts and images. WWW. With rapid advances in audio and video technologies, However, conventional Web servers are designed for data more and more contents will be encoded and delivered by services and hence have no provisions for delivering conmeans of audio/video in addition to texts and images. However, tinuous media (CM) such as audio and video. While a few conventional Web servers are designed for data services and commercial products allow streaming video directly from hence have no provisions for delivering continuous media such standard Web servers using the standard hypertext transfer as audio and video. While one can still provide continuousprotocol (HTTP), the video quality is usually limited and media services by a separate server in addition to the Web subject to the workload of the web server. server, extra hardware cost and management complexity are Another approach is to use a separate server to stream incurred. Moreover, unused capacity in the Web server cannot continuous media. Many commercial products are availbe utilized even if the continuous-media server is overloaded, and vice versa. This paper presents a design and implementaable in this category. Clearly this approach requires extra tion of a server which integrates continuous-media services hardware and increases management complexity as multiwith traditional Web services. To resolve disk and network ple servers have to be maintained. Moreover, unused cacontentions, a simple yet effective fixed-priority scheduler is pacity in the Web server cannot be utilized even if the CM employed. Experimental results show that the proposed schedserver is overloaded, and vice versa. uler performs well with non-real-time hardware and operating Unlike existing systems, this paper presents a design and system platforms.  1998 Academic Press implementation for a multimedia server where CM services are integrated with traditional Web services. In other words, the multimedia server software runs on a single server hardware and delivers both Web and CM services.