Sorry, I don't know how to write a proper title for such question in English, please edit my title if you have better words.
I am reading an article at here. There is a sentence I can't understand well:
the web server will not be able to do any processing on behalf of the concurrent requests that the process has already accepted.
I read this sentence again and again , thanks to I know web server is used to process requests, which finally make me understand web server must be on behalf of the process in logical.
But it's hard to understand at first sight. It is very easy to be confused as: AAA do something on behalf of BBB that/which description of BBB.
Such sentences are quite hard to understand for foreigners. I wouldn't understand the meaning If I don't know what web server is .
Is there any knack to understand such sentence's construction easily?
The technical words:
request: in computer science, a message sent between objects; some massage send from one cumputer to another(which hold web server)
web server: who process(handle, make some computation on) income massage(request)
process/processes: a process is an instance of a computer program that is being executed. wiki here
Update for @djna's answer:
Seems processing on behalf of the concurrent requests is the correct saying, this sentence do not have something strange grammatical inversion/preposition(I think it has when I post this question).The key is on behalf of.
The paragraph and its key idea I understand. Just that sentence is hard to translate for me, so as @djna said
processing is on behalf of/in the interest of a single request.
I just can't translate those into Chinese which would look very weird.
@djna says on behalf of means in the interest of here, in the interest of means something like stand for someone's benefit in my English-Chinese dictionary. Why a request has benefit? Only process/web server/computer can have benefit, request is their target which should not have benefit .Such as parallel processing requests would gain a good performance, I can say web server/computer gain benefit from that technical method . But the requests which are processed would not gain something for themself, they just death things, they don't have or care benefit. That is the logic of thinking in Chinese. Is English different?
Best Answer
This is an extract from a quite technical document. In addition to the problem of understanding the English constructs, you have second challenge in that certain terms have specialised technical meanings. Here we see process being used in a very particular way, as well as processing being used in a subtly different but related way.
In understanding this passage you need to identify the technical terms and establish their meaning in this particular document. You cannot do this simply by reading this one paragraph. We would hope that there would be a glossary for this particular document that would define the terms, however there may well not be one, so instead we at least need to look at a technical dictionary (for example), we cannot simply appeal to standard English usage.
So here you need to know what process, web server, request, concurrent and processing mean.
From my own knowledge of this field the Web Server is a particular process running on a computer, there will be many such processes running. The Web Server has responsibility to receive requests (typically from a Browser) and performs processing to satisfy those requests.
Here we come to the meaning of on behalf which can mean in the interest or aid of. So for each request some processing is done, that processing is on behalf of a single request.
The key idea is that the Web Server is satisfying multiple requests at the same time concurrently. And the issue being addressed is what happens is one request's processing effectively monopolises the Web Server for a period of time, in this case the other requests, concurrently being processed are stalled until the monopolising processing is finished.
Hence to understand this paragraph we need to get definitions of some technical terms but also need some quite detailed technical background information about multi-threaded concurrent processing.
The only slightly tricky English here is the on behalf, which becomes clear when we understand the relationship between a request and its processing.