CSCE 515 Computer Network Programming
Project 3, Due Date: November 24, 2:30pm, 2008
Graduate level
In this project, you are required to write an HTTP server that returns a document whose size is determined by the
requested URI. Your server will provide concurrency with TWO different methods. You will do some performance
measurements to determine whether there is a noticeable performance difference between the two concurrency
methods.
More specifically, your server needs to achieve the following requirements:
1. (4 points) Your HTTP server must be capable of providing concurrency in 2 different ways, either a forking
server (new child per request), or a pre-threaded server. A command line option is used to select whether a forking
server or the threaded server should be used for this execution.
2. (0.5 point) Your program should take at most two arguments, the port number that your server should bind to,
or/and the number of threads that should be created when your server initially starts.
If there is only one augment, the port number is found, your server should be a forking server.
If a second command line argument is found, your server should treat this as the number of threads to be used for a
pre-threaded server.
Usage: pj3 portnum [num_threads]
./pj3 1234 starts forking server on port 1234
./pj3 3333 100 starts pre-threaded server on port 3333 with 100 threads
3. (3 points) Your server should return a HTML document. The size of the document is determined by the requested
URI (any size between 100 and 20,000bytes). Your server should remove the leading slash โ/โ from the URI and
extract the resulting string as an integer (in decimal) that specified the size of the document to be sent to the client.
For example, for the following request line
GET /2000 HTTP/1.0
Your server should send back a HTML document that contains exactly 2,000 bytes of text, e.g. when the client save
the document on the local disk, the file size should be 2,000 bytes. The returned HTML document should follow the
proper format, but the content of the document can be anything. The minimum size requested to create a valid
document (with HTML, HEAD and BODY tags) will be 100 bytes. So if the requested URI asks for a size less than
100 bytes, your server should return a document with 100 bytes. As an example, the following document is 100
bytes long:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>100 bytes of fun</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY> a a a a a a a a a a a a </BODY>
</HTML>
4. (1 point) Your server must send back an HTTP response line, a Content-Type header and a Content-Length
header. None of these count towards the size of the document.
