The phenomenal growth in the use of the World Wide Web often places a heavy load on networks and servers, threatening to increase Web server response time and raising scalability issues for both the network and the server. Rather than large response times or connection failures that occur with typical loaded Web servers, clients are often willing to receive a degraded, less resource intensive version of the requested content. We propose and evaluate a server system that is capable of quantifying the load on a Web server and scaling the Web content delivered to a lower quality upon detecting high load, thus satisfying more clients and reducing response times. We experimentally evaluate our adaptive server system and compare it with an unadaptive server. We find that our adaptive content delivery server system can support as much as 25% more static requests, 15% more dynamic requests and twice as many multimedia requests as a non-adaptive server.

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See also:

• Rahul Pradhan and Mark Claypool. Adaptive Multimedia Content Delivery for Scalable Web Servers, Technical Report WPI-CS-TR-01-21, Computer Science Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, December 2001. ftp://ftp.cs.wpi.edu/pub/techreports/01-21.ps.gz

• Rahul Pradhan. Adaptive Multimedia Content Delivery for Scalable Web Servers, M.S. Thesis, Computer Science Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Spring 2001. (Advisor Mark Claypool)