Design goals

The test bed was designed to facilitate easy measurement of various parameters of web server performance like average response time for requests and the throughput of Web Server system. While setting up the test bed following goals were kept in mind:

1. The test bed should emulate real Internet scenario in the lab environment. It should use standard components and follow standard protocols used in Internet.

2. Test bed should be general enough so that different policies for request distribution at front node and DNS can be easily incorporated in this test bed. Thus it should make comparison of different schemes very easy.

3. The test bed should be flexible enough to modify only selected components without needing many changes in other components.

4. Servers should pass their state information to front node and front nodes should pass cluster state information to DNS so that various dynamic policies based on system state information for request distribution can be implemented and compared easily.

5. Design of test bed should be such that it does not constrain or fix the number of servers, clusters and clients to be used in the test bed.

6. It should only focus on distributed web sever system implementation and we should be free to use standard benchmarking software like "Webstone" for testing the performance of system.