But it's also the most capable, providing the most sophisticated load-balancing and redundancy on the market. Netscape Application Server's sophistication was evident even during its easy installation procedure. Netscape Application Server servers can operate on their own, or can be part of a larger Netscape Application Server cluster, a group of servers that share resources and information between themselves to ensure the fastest response time to client requests. We submitted a stream of requests to our Netscape Application Server cluster and, using Netscape Application Server's excellent Java-based performance monitoring tools, clearly saw all four machines handling our requests. There is no central server in a Netscape Application Server cluster.
Every machine has the same configuration and statistics.
To test these features, we distributed our test applications to all four servers in the cluster. When we forcibly crashed processes and disconnected systems from the network, the cluster seamlessly reconfigured itself to route requests to the remaining servers. Our client was never logged off, and Netscape Application Server's real-time session and state synchronization process meant clients were never disconnected and no partial transactions were ever lost. While the Netscape Application Server engine itself is written in C for speed, all of Netscape Application Server's administration and development tools are written in Java for easy portability. Netscape Application Server's administration console presented us with a single view of all the Netscape Application Server servers in our organization.