Web Server Performance Evaluation in Cloud Computing and Local Environment

Abstract: Context: Cloud computing is a concept in which a user get services like SaaS, PaaS and IaaS by deploying their data and application on remotely servers. Users have to pay only for the time the resources are acquired. They do not need to install and upgrade software and hardware. Due to these benefits organization are willing to move their data into the cloud and minimize their overhead. Organizations need to confirm that cloud can replace the traditional platform, software and hardware in an efficient way and provide robust performance. Web servers play a vital role providing services and deploying application. One might be interested to have information about a web server performance in the cloud. With this aim, we have compared cloud server performance with a local web server. Objectives: The objective of this study is to investigate cloud performance. For this purpose, we first find out the parameters and factors that affect a web server performance. Finding the parameters helped us in measuring the actual performance of a cloud server on some specific task. These parameters will help users, developers and IT specialists to measure cloud performance based on their requirements and needs. Methods: In order to fulfill the objective of this study, we performed a Systematic literature review and an experiment. The Systematic literature review is performed by studying articles from electronic sources including ACM Digital Library, IEEE, EiVillage (Compendx,Inspec). The Snowball method is used to minimize the chance of missing articles and to increase the validity of our findings. In experiment, two performance parameters (Throughput and Execution Time) are used to measure the performance of the Apache Web Server in Local and Cloud environment. Results: In Systematic literature review, we found many factors that affect the performance of a web server in Cloud computing. Most common of them are throughput, response time, execution time, CPU and other resource utilization. The experimental results revealed that web server performed well in local environment as compared to cloud environment. But there are other factors like cost overhead, software/ hardware configuration, software/hardware up -gradation and time consumption due to which cloud computing cannot be neglected. Conclusions: The parameters that affect the cloud performance are throughput, response time, execution time, CPU utilization and memory utilization. Increase and decrease in values of these parameters can affect cloud performance to a great extent. Overall performance of a cloud is not that effective but there are other reasons for using cloud computing