In June 1998, we organized a Workshop on Internet Server Performance (WISP 98) in conjunction with SIGMETRICS/Performance'98 in Madison, Wisconsin. The meeting was well attended and 13 full-papers were presented. In this special issue of Performance Evaluation Review, we are pleased to present six of the 13 papers, selected according to the reviews of the workshop.

The performance of Internet servers, including Web servers, associated database and multimedia servers, and proxy servers, directly affects users' experience on the Web. The common theme in this collection of papers is reducing "World-Wide Wait", and the papers examine techniques ranging from proxy caching to server mirroring.

The first paper by Ramon Caceres et al investigates the real benefits of Web proxy caching in the environment of modem pools connecting to the Internet. They found that perhaps the most important role of the proxy is not in caching data, but rather in "caching" connections to Web servers and reusing them whenever possible. The second paper by Diwakar Krishnamurthy and Jerome Rolia analyzes response times of an electronic commerce server under a variety of workload conditions. In addition, the paper examines approaches that use the response time measurement to predict the quality-of-service of the server.

The next paper by Gaurav Banga et al takes a look at existing general purpose operating systems, highlighting their limitations that prevent Internet servers from achieving higher performance, and proposes a new set of operating system features that provide better support for Internet applications. The paper by David Mosberger and Tai Jin describes httperf, a configurable high-performance Web server benchmark. A particular focus of the paper is on implementation challeges that the authors faced in making httperf robust and light-weight. The paper by Amy Ward et al proposes a novel technique that detect performance failures of Internet services at an early stage through observations of changes in server throughput. The collection of papers is rounded off by the paper authored by Mehmet Sayal et al on selection algorithms for replicated web servers.

Thanks are due to SIGMETRICS/Performance'98 General Chair Mary Vernon and the conference organizers for making this workshop a reality. We are also grateful to the other program committee members for actively participating in the reviewing process, and in compiling the complete program and in selecting this set of papers for publication in Performance Evaluation Review. The program committee consisted of the following members:

A complete listing of the workshop proceedings can be found at:

http://cs.wisc.edu/~cao/WISP98.html.

Pei Cao and Sekhar Sarukkai ( cao@cs.wisc.edu; sekhar@hpl.hp.com )
Workshop Co-chairs