Performance Measurement of World Wide Web servers

The World Wide Web (WWW, or Web) is one of the most important Internet services, and has been largely responsible for the increasing popularity of the Internet in recent years. The WWW continues to expand in both size and content, and is primarily responsible for the growth of e-commerce activity by the use of the Internet. To improve users' satisfaction with e-commerce WWW services, a lot of work has been done on characterizing the performance of Internet applications and servers. In this paper we outline a monitoring application for performance measurement of WWW servers. By observing the behaviour of WWW servers and measuring their performance, we can estimate several performance indices. Our monitoring application simulates the access of a number of clients to the same Web page and its links. Our simulator allows the user to choose different scenarios based on different ways clients can access a Web page, and compare the resulting times.