Experiences Parallelizing a Web Server with OpenMP

Abstract

Multi-threaded web servers are typically parallelized by hand using the pthreads library. OpenMP has rarely been used to parallelize such kind of applications, although we foresee that it can be a great tool for network servers developers. In this paper we compare how easy is to parallelize the Boa web server using OpenMP, compared to a pthreads parallelization, and the performance achieved. We present the results of a parallelization based on OpenMP 2.0, the dynamic sections model and pthreads.