This paper describes three enhancements to the TCP splic-
ing mechanism: (1) Enable a TCP connection to be simulta-
neously spliced through multiple machines for higher scala-
bility; (2) Make a spliced connection fault-tolerant to proxy
failures; and (3) Provide flexibility of splitting a TCP splice
between a proxy and a backend server for further increas-
ing the scalability of a web server system. A web server ar-
chitecture based on this enhanced TCP splicing is proposed.
This architecture provides a highly scalable, seamless ser-
vice to the users with minimal disruption during server fail-
ures. In addition to the traditional web services in which users
download webpages, multimedia files and other types of data
from a web server, the proposed architecture supports newly
emerging web services that are highly interactive, and involve
relatively longer, stateful client-server sessions. A prototype
of this architecture has been implemented as a Linux 2.6 ker-
nel module, and the paper presents important performance
results measured from this implementation.