COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS: A CANADIAN EXPERIENCE Scalability of Web-Based Electronic Commerce Systems

Amazon.com, in its letter to shareholders, mentioned that it served 25 million customer accounts in 2001. In a Web-based electronic commerce system, users browse product information offered by an online store and submit requests to purchase selected items. From the user’s perspective, response time is a factor that could impact the acceptability of electronic commerce. This article is concerned with system architectures for online stores. Emphasis is placed on techniques to improve a system’s capacity to support more users without suffering a noticeable degradation in response time performance. Such techniques have been investigated as part of a Canadian Institut