University of Houston
Department of Computer Science

For individual web developers, web  development is mainly  implemented in a Microsoft Windows environment, for example, Windows 2000 or Windows XP where the popular server is either Microsoft'  Internet Information Service (IIS) server or freely available Apache server. Our project  deals with web server performance testing especially IIS vs. Apache. We also focus on web server for individual users as opposed to enterprise-scale web servers.

  One of the main questions most web server clients and developers meet is the performance problem. We need realistic and meaningful ways of measuring server performance. Our project utilized Microsoft Foundation Classes as MFC of Microsoft Visual C++ to create a  dialog based workload simulator and web server performance testing system. We used the popular Webstone benchmark to test web server performance and criteria such as  file size, average connection time, average response time, connection rate and throughput. We  tested the IIS web server and Apache web server in Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP Professional environment and analyzed the  performance data.

This workload simulator and web server performance testing system provides us with web server performance data and  making it  easier and  more convenient for users to  implement and understand the results. Users can also tune their server to get the highest yield from it.