Load Distribution for Scalable Web Servers:

Abstract

The 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games were the first to have an official Web site. This site had more than 60 Web server hosts, spread across 5 locations in 4 countries, and registered over 192 million hits during the 17 days of the games. This paper describes some of the challenges of building, operating and managing such a large distributed system. In particular, it outlines the use of novel TCP/IP technologies for sharing the load of HTTP requests across local and global servers. Using these technologies enabled us to build a scalable distributed Web server site that was able to comfortably support a huge demand. We also describe some of the management tools used for monitoring the system, logging HTTP requests, and providing secure access to system resources. 1 Introduction The 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games Web site, www.atlanta.olympic.org, was created and operated by IBM. The name WOMplex 1 was used as the umbrella code-name to describe a combination of technologies that included conte..