server overview

Common features

1. Virtual hosting to serve many web sites using one IP address.
2. Large file support to be able to serve files whose size is greater than 2 GB on 32 bit OS.
3. Bandwidth throttling to limit the speed of responses in order to not saturate the network and to be able to serve more clients.

Origin of returned content

The origin of the content sent by server is known as:

• static if it comes from an existing file lying on a file system;
• dynamic if it is dynamically generated by some other program or script or application programming interface (API) called by the web server.

Serving static content is usually much faster (from 2 to 100 times) than serving dynamic content, especially if the latter involves data pulled from a database.

Path translation

Web servers are able to map the path component of a Uniform Resource Locator(URL) into:

• a local file system resource (for static requests);
• an internal or external program name (for dynamic requests).