Webserver Architecture

Horizontal scaling

Adding horizontal scaling to the web layer can be quite tricky. One might start by using a single core somewhere to do all the work. The task of a load-balancer is to route the incoming request to an appropriate core on some server. Using homogeneous servers (having same number of cores) might make work of a load-balancer bit easier. Such a design has many pros and cons.

• Good horizontal scaling with increasing load.
• High throughput

But the cons are:

• High latency, especially when web page becomes complex to stitch due to addition of more features.
• There is so much a single core can do in a reasonable time.

(ToDo: an illustration with single-core model)