Web Servers

A web server is a computer programme which is responsible for accepting HTTP requests. These requests from clients are known as web browsers. The programme then serves the HTTP responses and other data like web pages such as linked objects and web pages. A web server could also be a computer that would run this programme. Web servers may have certain differences in detail but they do have a few common features. The most common feature is that of HTTP. Every web server works by accepting these requests from client browser and then giving a response to the client. Another common feature is that of logging. All web servers have the ability to log certain information about requests and responses. Many servers also have certain other common features other than these two.

Authentification is an authorisation request that is optional. Here the username and password is required before logging into a site or part of a site. Most web servers also have another common feature which is how to handle static content. All servers also have HTTPS support and can compress the content along with virtual hosting so as to serve different sites with only one IP address. Servers also have the possibility of holding really large files over 2 GB and that to on a 32 bit OS. They can throttle bandwidths too which is usually done to limit the rate at which responses are received so that the network is not saturated and more clients can be served. There are two kinds of contents sent by the server. The first is static which is if it comes from a file which already exists on the file system. The other is dynamic which is if the content is generated dynamically by a programme other than Application Programming Interface or Script. Serving content that is static is usually upto 100 times faster than dynamic content.