Summary

We've presented a brief overview of web servers in Linux and discussed what web servers are, what they do, and how they use the network. We also described how web servers need to handle many simultaneous clients, and we outlined the possible architectures used to implement concurrency. These include the process-based, thread-based, event-based, and kernel-based approaches; the advantages and disadvantages of each were discussed. We presented the most common tuning options for web servers on Linux, both for the operating system and for the server itself. Finally, we discussed how web server performance is evaluated and gave examples of some of the software tools used for that purpose.