See a paper accepted by Webnet 98 conference about Jamming.Net See a page dedicated to compare different solutions to balance internet servers. See a Virtual Balanced Web Server: it runs on a Linux Pentium and a Solaris 2.5 machine. The content is Medialab Web server. Manage the Virtual Balanced Web Server Jamming.Net is NOW! open source, under the GNU licence.

Jamming.Net

A need for advanced solution to manage high load traffic is necessary, as the WWW increases in size and complexity. Today, the most common solution is to have a single web server running on a very powerful machine with great capacity of memory, fast processors, fast access disk array. This way to face the problem is somewhat limited.

There are three requirements that modern systems should meet in order to publish information:

• Network Scalability: preserving the used hardware architecture and adding only a new HTTP server running on a different machine, whenever the incoming traffic to an existing HTTP server increases.
• Load Balancing: sharing traffic among a group of HTTP servers according to some policies which depend on local load or some pseudo random heuristic.
• Fault Tolerance : In case of fault of one of the servers we want to be able to recover, stopping its use and replacing it with one of alive servers automatically.

We developed a software server architecture that tries address these requirements.

Antonio Gullì
gulli@di.unipi.it