A decision support system for tuning Web servers in distributed object oriented network architectures
R.D. van der Mei, Willa K. Ehrlich, Paul Kevin Reeser, J. P. Francisco · ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review · 2000
Web technologies are currently being employed to provide end user interfaces in diverse computing environments. The core element of these Web solutions is a Web server that is based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) running over TCP/IP. Web servers are required to respond to millions of transaction requests per day at an "acceptable" Quality of Service (QoS) level with respect to the end-to-end response time and the server throughput. In many applications, the server performs significant server-side processing in distributed, object-oriented (OO) computing environments. In these applications, a Web server retrieves a file, parses the file for scripting language content, interprets the scripting statements and then executes embedded code, possibly requiring a TCP connection to a remote application for data transfer. In this paper, we present an end-to-end model that addresses this new class of Web servers that engage in OO computing. We have implemented the model in a simulation tool. Performance predictions based on the simulations are shown to match well with performance observed in a test environment. Therefore, the model forms an excellent basis for a Decision Support System for system architects, allowing them to predict the behavior of systems prior to their creation, or the behavior of existing systems under new load scenarios.