Memory Memory is vital to Web server performance. Ideally, a Web server has enough RAM to handle all necessary applications, network buffers, and so on, and enough RAM for caching requested filesystem data. This improvement occurs because the long latencies that can be introduced in disk reads are eliminated if the server fetches data directly from memory instead of the hard disks. Tools to determine memory usage for tuning purposes are discussed below . After CPU and memory factors, network performance is the most common bottleneck for basic Web serving.
Bottlenecks occur as a result of the fixed bandwidth on a specific network interface.
This configuration also results in improved Web server performance. The server may respond to one or more hostnames in different ways without using IP aliasing, making use of software virtual servers . This eliminates the need to spawn multiple instances of the server, which was necessary for earlier versions of Netscape. Each server spawns a certain number of processes . These processes manage the load of the system, increasing or decreasing the number of child processes, or threads , as appropriate.