Jason D. LaVoie

Adaptive fast path architecture

Adaptive Fast Path Architecture (AFPA) is a software architecture that dramatically improves the efficiency, and therefore the capacity, of Web and other network servers. The architecture includes a RAM-based cache that serves static content and a reverse proxy that can distribute requests for dynamic content to multiple servers. These two mechanisms are combined using a flexible layer-7 (content-based) routing facility. The architecture defines interfaces that allow these generic mechanisms to be exploited to accelerate a variety of application protocols, including HTTP. Efficiency is derived from maximizing the number of requests that are handled entirely within the kernel, using a deferred-interrupt context instead of threads wherever possible. AFPA has been implemented on several server platforms including Microsoft Windows NT® and Windows® 2000, OS/390®, AIX®, and most recently Linux. By conservative estimates, AFPA more than doubles capacity for serving static content compared to conventional server architectures, and has allowed IBM to establish a leadership position in Web server performance. A prototype implementation of AFPA on Linux delivers more than 10000 SPECweb96 operations per second on a single processor.