How server manage different user's requests at a time?

Question

can you tell me how server handles different http request at a time. If 10 users logged in a site and send request for a page at the same time what will happen?

Answer 1

Usually, each of the users sends a HTTP request for the page. The server receives the requests and delegates them to different workers (processes or threads).

Depending on the URL given, the server reads a file and sends it back to the user. If the file is a dynamic file such as a PHP file, the file is executed before it's send back to the user.

Once the requested file has been sent back, the server usually closes the connection after a few seconds.

For more, see: HowStuffWorks Web Servers

Answer 2

Apache 2 has two different modes of operation. One is running as a threaded server the other is using a mode called "prefork" (multiple processes).

Answer 3

The requests will be processed simultaneously, to the best ability of the HTTP daemon.

Typically, the HTTP daemon will spawn either several processes or several threads and each one will handle one client request. The server may keep spare threads/processes so that when a client makes a request, it doesn't have to wait for the thread/process to be created. Each thread/process may be mapped to a different processor or core so that they can be processed more quickly. In most circumstances, however, what holds the requests is network I/O, not lack of raw computing, so there is frequently no slowdown from having a number of processors/cores significantly lower than the number of requests handled at one time.

Answer 4

HTTP uses TCP which is a connection-based protocol. That is, clients establish a TCP connection while they're communicating with the server.

Multiple clients are allowed to connect to the same destination port on the same destination machine at the same time. The server just opens up multiple simultaneous connections.

Apache (and most other HTTP servers) have a multi-processing module (MPM). This is responsible for allocating Apache threads/processes to handle connections. These processes or threads can then run in parallel on their own connection, without blocking each other. Apache's MPM also tends to keep open "spare" threads or processes even when no connections are open, which helps speed up subsequent requests.

The program ab (short for ApacheBench) which comes with Apache lets you test what happens when you open up multiple connections to your HTTP server at once.

Apache's configuration files will normally set a limit for the number of simultaneous connections it will accept. This will be set to a reasonable number, such that during normal operation this limit should never be reached.

Note too that the HTTP protocol (from version 1.1) allows for a connection to be kept open, so that the client can make multiple HTTP requests before closing the connection, potentially reducing the number of simultaneous connections they need to make.

More on Apache's MPMs:

Apache itself can use a number of different multi-processing modules (MPMs). Apache 1.x normally used a module called "prefork", which creates a number of Apache processes in advance, so that incoming connections can often be sent to an existing process. This is as I described above.

Apache 2.x normally uses an MPM called "worker", which uses multithreading (running multiple execution threads within a single process) to achieve the same thing. The advantage of multithreading over separate processes is that threading is a lot more light-weight compared to opening separate processes, and may even use a bit less memory. It's very fast.

The disadvantage of multithreading is you can't run things like mod_php. When you're multithreading, all your add-in libraries need to be "thread-safe" - that is, they need to be aware of running in a multithreaded environment. It's harder to write a multi-threaded application. Because threads within a process share some memory/resources between them, this can easily create race condition bugs where threads read or write to memory when another thread is in the process of writing to it. Getting around this requires techniques such as locking. Many of PHP's built-in libraries are not thread-safe, so those wishing to use mod_php cannot use Apache's "worker" MPM.

Answer 5

The server (apache) is multi-threaded, meaning it can run multiple programs at once. A few years ago, a single CPU could switch back and forth quickly between multiple threads, giving on the appearance that two things were happening at once. These days, computers have multiple processors, so the computer can actually run two threads of code simultaneously. That being said, threads aren't really mapped to processors in any simple way.

With that ability, a PHP program can be thought of as a single thread of execution. If two requests reach the server at the same time, two threads can be used to process the request simultaneously. They will probably both get about the same amount of CPU, so if they are doing the same thing, they will complete at approximately the same time.

One of the most common issues with multi-threading is "race conditions"-- where you two requests are doing the same thing ("racing" to do the same thing), if it is a single resource, one of them is going to win. If they both insert a record into the database, they can't both get the same id-- one of them will win. So you need to be careful when writing code to realize other requests are going on at the same time and may modify your database, write files or change globals.

That being said, the programming model allows you to mostly ignore this complexity.