Abstract

Alteon WebSystems, Inc. commissioned The Tolly Group to benchmark and compare the HTTP transaction performance of its ACEdirector 3 Web switch running Web OS version 8.0 and version 6.0.52, with ArrowPoint Communications, Inc.’s CS-100 Content Smart Web Switch version 3.02.

This Tolly Group evaluation compares the HTTP transaction performance of Alteon WebSystems’ ACEdirector 3 Web switch against ArrowPoint Communications’ CS-100 Content Smart Web Switch in Layer 7 URL-switching scenarios. The report focused on how efficiently each platform could inspect HTTP requests, parse URL content, select the correct destination server, and complete the session-handling work required for content-aware load balancing. Alteon’s ACEdirector 3 was tested with both Web OS version 6.0.52 and Beta Web OS version 8.0, the latter introducing Alteon’s new Virtual Matrix Architecture (VMA).   

The results showed a major performance gain with ACEdirector 3 version 8.0. In single Fast Ethernet client/network port-pair testing, ACEdirector 3 v8.0 delivered 6,300 HTTP transactions per second, compared with 1,356tps for ACEdirector 3 v6.0.52 and 1,193tps for the ArrowPoint CS-100. As shown in the charts on pages 1 and 2, ACEdirector 3 v8.0 maintained essentially the same throughput as port pairs increased, measuring 6,286tps with two client/network port pairs and 6,211tps with three, while the CS-100 remained near 1,100 to 1,200tps. This meant the newer Alteon software delivered roughly five to six times the transaction throughput of the ArrowPoint platform across all tested configurations.   

The report attributes much of this improvement to VMA, which allows any client port to use all available distributed processors and associated memory across the switch instead of relying on statically allocated per-port resources. By contrast, the report describes the ArrowPoint CS-100 as depending on a central RISC-based CPU connected to its switching fabric at 155Mbit/s for Layer 4 through 7 processing tasks such as HTTP flow setup, URL parsing, and server selection.   

The test bed used 50 Windows NT clients running WebBench 3.0 with 12 threads each and 11 Microsoft IIS 3.0 Web servers, with each requested file residing on only one server so that the switch had to make URL-based forwarding decisions. Overall, the report presents ACEdirector 3 v8.0 as a significant advance in Layer 7 Web switching, delivering substantially higher transaction-processing capacity and stronger scalability than both its earlier software version and the competing CS-100.