Database server workload characterization in an e-commerce environment

A typical E-commerce system that is deployed on the Internet has multiple layers that include Web users, Web servers, application servers, and a database server. As the system use and user request frequency increase, Web/application servers can be scaled up by replication. A load balancing proxy can be used to route user requests to individual machines that perform the same functionality. To address the increasing workload while avoiding replicating the database server, various dynamic caching policies have been proposed to reduce the database workload in E-commerce systems. However, the nature of the changes seen by the database server as a result of dynamic caching remains unknown. A good understanding of this change is fundamental for tuning a database server to get better performance. In this study, the TPC-W (a transactional Web E-commerce benchmark) workloads on a database server are characterized under two different dynamic caching mechanisms, which are generalized and implemented as query-result cache and table cache. The characterization focuses on response time, CPU computation, buffer pool references, disk I/O references, and workload classification. This thesis combines a variety of analysis techniques: simulation, real time measurement and data mining. The experimental results in this thesis reveal some interesting effects that the dynamic caching has on the database server workload characteristics. The main observations include: (a) dynamic cache can considerably reduce the CPU usage of the database server and the number of database page references when it is heavily loaded; (b) dynamic cache can also reduce the database reference locality, but to a smaller degree than that reported in file servers. The data classification results in this thesis show that with dynamic cache, the database server sees TPC-W profiles more like on-line transaction processing workloads

A user perspective of quality of service in m-commerce

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2004 Springer VerlagIn an m-commerce setting, the underlying communication system will have to provide a Quality of Service (QoS) in the presence of two competing factors—network bandwidth and, as the pressure to add value to the business-to-consumer (B2C) shopping experience by integrating multimedia applications grows, increasing data sizes. In this paper, developments in the area of QoS-dependent multimedia perceptual quality are reviewed and are integrated with recent work focusing on QoS for e-commerce. Based on previously identified user perceptual tolerance to varying multimedia QoS, we show that enhancing the m-commerce B2C user experience with multimedia, far from being an idealised scenario, is in fact feasible if perceptual considerations are employed

Analyzing web server performance under dynamic user workloads

The increasing popularity of web applications has introduced a new paradigm where users are no longer passive web consumers but they become active contributors to the web, specially in the contexts of social networking, blogs, wikis or e-commerce. In this new paradigm, contents and services are even more dynamic, which consequently increases the level of dynamism in user's behavior. Moreover, this trend is expected to rise in the incoming web. This dynamism is a major adversity to define and model representative web workload, in fact, this characteristic is not fully represented in the most of the current web workload generators. This work proves that the web user's dynamic behavior is a crucial point that must be addressed in web performance studies in order to accurately estimate system performance indexes. In this paper, we analyze the effect of using a more realistic dynamic workload on the web performance metrics. To this end, we evaluate a typical e-commerce scenario and compare the results obtained using different levels of dynamic workload instead of traditional workloads. Experimental results show that, when a more dynamic and interactive workload is taken into account, performance indexes can widely differ and noticeably affect the stress borderline on the server. For instance, the processor usage can increase 30% due to dynamism, affecting negatively average response time perceived by users, which can also turn in unwanted effects in marketing and fidelity policies. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under Grant TIN-2009-08201.Peña Ortiz, R.; Gil Salinas, JA.; Sahuquillo Borrás, J.; Pont Sanjuan, A. (2013). Analyzing web server performance under dynamic user workloads. Computer Communications. 36(4):386-395. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2012.11.005S38639536

Performance measurements of Web services

Web services are rapidly evolving application-integration technologies that allow applications in heterogeneous environments to communicate with each other. In this thesis we perform a measurements-based study of an e-commerce application that uses web services to execute business operations. We use the TPC-W specification to generate a session-based workload. The component level response times and the hardware resource usage on the different machines are measured. The component level response times are extracted from the application server logs. From the results it is seen that as the workload increases the response times of the web services components increase. From the hardware resource usage it is clear that web service components require more processing time due to the processing of XML data required in each web service call. The method used in this thesis allows us to study the impact that different components can have on the overall performance of an application

The impact of User-Browser Interaction on web performance

© ACM 2013. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in ACM, In Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (pp. 695-702). http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2480362.2480497The user interaction with the current web contents is a major concern when defining web workloads in order to precisely estimate system performance. However, the intrinsic diffi- culty to represent this behavior in a workload model leads many research works to still use workloads non representative of the current web navigations. In contrast, in previous works we demonstrated that the use of an accurate workload model that considers user’s dynamism when navigating the web clearly affects system performance metrics. In this paper we analyze, for the first time, the effect of considering the User-Browser Interaction (UBI) as a part of user’s dynamic behavior on web workload characterization in performance studies. To this end, we evaluate a typical e-commerce scenario and compare the obtained results for different UBI behaviors, such as the use of the back button and parallel browsing originated by using browser tabs or opening new windows when surfing a website.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant TIN-2009-08201.Peña Ortiz, R.; Gil Salinas, JA.; Sahuquillo Borrás, J.; Pont Sanjuan, A. (2013). The impact of User-Browser Interaction on web performance. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2480362.2480497