Data Center Fundamentals

Chapter 2. Server Architecture Overview

This chapter covers the following topics:

• Network interface card basics

• Server processing of network traffic from the Ethernet driver to the socket layer

• TCP and UDP algorithms and timeouts applied to simple applications

• The workings of multiprocess and multithreaded servers, and the implications on server availability

• The behavior of the client TCP/IP stack in the presence of server failure

• An example of a web server configuration

• The Window Scale option and its support for higher throughput on high-speed networks

• Jumbo frames and their optimization of servers’ performance

• Reverse proxy caches and their improvement of application performance

• The importance of load balancers in Data ...