CS856: Project Ideas

• Understanding and Improving DHCP performance.
  • DHCP has been reported to be slow even in local area network environments.
  • It can be especially bad in mobile wireless environments.
  • Step 1: Understand why it is slow and improve it's performance so that it works well in wired environments.
  • Step 2: Understand why it is slow and improve it's performance so that it works well in wireless environments.
  • Step 3: Understand why it is slow and improve it's performance so that it works well in wireless environments with mobile devices. E.g., a car passing an access point at 80 Km/hour.
• Knot, with a user-level cache seems to perform as well and maybe in some scenarios better than Knot using sendfile. Understand and explain why that is.
• Related to the above point (possible done as the same project) Add a user-level cache to the userver and compare its performance with the userver using sendfile.
• Capriccio doesn't work with multiprocessors. Knot is apparently written to use a pthreads API. Can one modify Knot to use a good pthreads implementation and then compare it's performance on a multiprocessor with something like the userver, WatPipe and other servers.
• Implement ISAPI support in the userver and compare its performance with that of FASTCGI.
• Get JSP working with the userver. I think that this would involve implementing support for AJP in the userver and then connecting it to something like Tomcat. Once this is done run some interesting benchmarks (e.g., SpecWeb2005) and compare its performance with something that would be interesting.
• Compare the performance of the userver on a multiprocessor with an interesting subset of Zeus, Rock Web Server, Apache, WatPipe.
• Obtain a copy of some interesting web servers, tune them to run SpecWeb2005 benchmarks and compare their performance.
• Compare the performance of a web server benchmark with application servers executing on the same multiprocessor as the web server with the performance of application servers executing on one or more separate servers from the web server.