Priority scheduling service for E-commerce web servers

Service scheduling is one of the crucial issues in E-commerce environment. E-commerce web servers often get overloaded as they have to deal with a large number of customers’ requests—for example, browse, search, and pay, in order to make purchases or to get product information from E-commerce web sites. In this paper, we propose a new approach in order to effectively handle high traffic load and to improve web server’s performance. Our solution is to exploit networking techniques and to classify customers’ requests into different classes such that some requests are prioritised over others. We contend that such classification is financially beneficial to E-commerce services as in these services some requests are more valuable than others. For instance, the processing of “browse” request should get less priority than “payment” request as the latter is considered to be more valuable to the service provider. Our approach analyses the arrival process of distinct requests and employs a priority scheduling service at the network nodes that gives preferential treatment to high priority requests. The proposed approach is tested through various experiments which show significant decrease in the response time of high priority requests. This also reduces the probability of dropping high priority requests by a web server and thus enabling service providers to generate more revenue

Performance Evaluation of Distributed Web Server Architectures under E-Commerce Workloads

High performance, secure and highly reliable web server architecture is one of the central and key components to make the E-Commerce a success. Fundamental to the goal of improving web server performance is a solid understanding of behavior and performance of web servers. However, very little research is found on evaluating web server performance based on realistic workload representing E-Commerce applications which are usually exemplified by a large amount of dynamic objects such as CGI (Common Gateway Interface), ASP (Active Server Page), or Servlet (Java Server-side interface) calls. This paper presents a performance study under the workload with a mixture of static web page requests, CGI requests, Servlet requests, and database queries. System throughputs and user response times are measured for five different server architectures consisting of PCs that run both a web server program and a database. We observed that performance behaviors of the web server architectures considered under this mixed workload are quite different from that under static page workload and sometimes counter-intuitive. Our performance results suggest that there is a large room for potential performance improvement for web servers. Key Words⎯Distributed web server, performance analysis, dynamic object 2 I