Server Farms
Theclustering features of Web Server allow you to easily deploy to a server farm. Because all
serversin a server farm share identical congurations, tuning is not done on a server-by-server
basis.
64–Bit Servers
Theperformance for the 64–bit Web Server is not necessarily better than the performance for
the32–bit Web Server, but the 64–bit server scales better. Because the 32–bit Web Server
processis conned to 4 GB of address space, it can run out of address space attempting to
supportsimultaneous sessions beyond a certain limit. Even if the host machine has available
memoryand CPU resources, the 32–bit Web Server might not be able to take advantage of it
becauseof the address space limit. The 64–bit Web Server can run more applications and
servletsthan the 32-bit server. Also, the 64–bit Web Server can cache several GBs of static
content,while the 32-bit Web Server is conned to 4 GB of address space.
Ingeneral, the tuning for the 64–bit Web Server is similar to the tuning for the 32–bit Web
Server.The dierences are mostly tuned at the operating system level. Tuning specics are
discussedin “Tuning UltraSPARC T1–Based Systems for Performance Benchmarking” on
page97.
SSL Performance
SSLalways has a signicant impact on throughput, so for best performance minimize your use
ofSSL, or consider using a multi-CPU server to handle it.
ForSSL, the Web Server uses the NSS library. However, there are other options available for
SSL:
■Ifyou are using the Solaris 10 operating system, kernel SSL (KSSL) is available. It does not
containall the algorithms available, as does NSS, but it often provides better performance.
■Acryptographic card hardware accelerator for SSL can also improve performance.
■Ifyou are using the 64–bit Web Server on Solaris, you can use the cryptographic accelerator
ofthe UltraSPARC T1 processor.
SSLPerformance
Chapter1 • Performance and Monitoring Overview 21