Simulating and Modeling Secure e-Business Applications

Characterizing application servers performance becomes a hard work when the system is unavailable or when spending a great amount of time and resources is required to generate the results. In this paper we propose the modelization and simulation of complex systems, such as application servers, in order to alleviate this limitation. Using simulation, and specifically coarse-grain simulation as we propose, allows to overcome the necessity of using the real system while spending only 1/10 of the time employed by the real system to generate the results. Our simulation proposal can be used to obtain server performance measurements, to evaluate server behavior with different configuration parameters or to evaluate the impact of incorporating to the servers additional mechanisms to improve their performance without the necessity of using the real system. In our evaluation, we use simulation to obtain performance measurements of a Tomcat application server with SSL security, to evaluate Tomcat performance if an admission control mechanism would be incorporated and to determine the Tomcat performance enhancements with 8 CPUs without having a machine of similar features, showing in all the cases the usefulness of our proposal.