Web Server
Your server will have to do a few different things. First, it will need to bind to a port specified as a command line argument. After successfully doing this, it must listen for incoming client connections and accept them. (Hint: all of the highlighted words are the names of system calls used to do these things).
The server will need to fork() a new process for each connection that it is handling. It is not quite this simple though. If you simply keep forking new processes, when the client closes its connection, you will end up with a zombie process. These zombie processes will build up and slowly eat up your machine's resources. Obviously, this isn't good.
To remedy this, you should write a signal handler for the SIGCHLD signal to properly dispose of zombified children (hehe).
After the new process has been created, the server is responsible for reading data from the client (recv) and parsing it as an HTTP request. We are only concerned with GET requests. Remember that handy dictionary you wrote in A1? That'll be really useful here, since HTTP headers are a key/value data structure.
Now that the GET request has been parsed, you can look up the file that is being requested. If the server can locate the file, it should form an appropriate response header and serve file back to the client with a 200 response code. If it can't find it, it should return a 404 response code. If there is some other kind of error, just throw a 500 response code.
Note that you should support enough of the HTTP protocol to allow a web browser to navigate to the port your server is running on and successfully get a file. This article should help you with that.
Profiling Your Server
After you have a working server (or before, doesn't really matter), you should write a client program to test your web server and gather various statistics on its performance. The statistics you collect are really up to you, but I recommend testing throughput (requests/second), the length of an average successful request vs. an unsuccessful one, and request time vs. file size. You can write the client in any language. Merry Christmas.
After you have gathered a solid amount of statistics, you should write a short paper on your server's performance. Point out bottlenecks and analyze the data that you've gathered, as well as coming up with a few suggestions on how you may be able to increase performance. This doesn't have to be a thesis, but it should be a solid analysis of what you've done.
https://github.com/funkenstein/WMU-CS2240