Scalable web server design for distributed data management

With the explosive popularity of the internet and the world wide web (WWW), there is a rapidly growing need to provide unprecedented access to globally distributed data sources through the internet. Web accessibility will be an essential component of the services that future digital libraries should provide for clients. This need has created a strong demand for database access capability through the internet, and high performance scalable web servers. As most popular web sites are experiencing overload from an increasing number of users accessing the sites at the same time, it is desired that scalable web servers should adapt to the changing access characteristics and should be capable of handling a large number of concurrent requests simultaneously, with reasonable response times and minimal request drop rates.