AMD Opteron 248 vs. Intel Xeon 2.8: 2-way Web Servers go Head to Head

The Evolution of the Web Server

Web servers have evolved over the years from the traditional static delivery model to the dynamic model common to present web architecture. The static model was basically static text files with all of the web content pre-authored and ready for client delivery. Today, most web architectures are much more complex.

Present architecture usually consists of a web server, application server and a back-end database server. In most cases, the application server resides on the same physical machine as the web server (two-tier architecture), but in some cases, the Application server resides on its own physical machine (three-tier architecture). The web server’s job is to deliver the content that is generated by the application server to the client. The application server either interprets code or executes compiled code written by the developer and hands it off to the web server for client delivery. As you can guess, the web architecture of today is much more strenuous on hardware as it has to actually work to deliver web content to the client instead of just spitting out HTML files.

There are numerous application servers used in today’s web applications. AnandTech uses Macromedia ColdFusion MX, which is simply a language that runs on top of a J2EE server (Macromedia JRUN in our case). J2EE is a Java based runtime platform that Sun Microsystems created, which allows developers to create enterprise level applications and deploy those applications on a standards based platform. Because of our familiarity and the fact that J2EE is a popular industry standard application server, we chose it for our web tests.