A hybrid Web server architecture for e-commerce applications

The performance of an e-commerce application can be measured according to technical metrics but also following business indicators. The revenue obtained by a commercial Web application is directly related to the amount of clients that complete business transactions. In technical terms, a business transaction is completed when a Web client successfully finishes a browsing session. In this paper we introduce a novel Web server architecture that combines the best aspects of both the multithreaded and the event-driven architectures, the two major existing alternatives, to create a server model that offers an improved performance in terms of user session completions without loosing the natural ease of programming characteristic of the multithreading paradigm. We describe the implementation of this architecture on the Tomcat 5.5 server and evaluate its performance. The obtained results demonstrate the feasibility of the hybrid architecture and the performance benefits that this model introduces for e-commerce applications.

[1]  Richard Murch,et al.  Autonomic Computing , 2004 .

[2]  David L. Cohn,et al.  Autonomic Computing , 2003, ISADS.

[3]  Willy Zwaenepoel,et al.  Flash: An efficient and portable Web server , 1999, USENIX Annual Technical Conference, General Track.

[4]  Heiko Ludwig,et al.  Defining and Monitoring Service-Level Agreements for Dynamic e-Business , 2002, LISA.

[5]  David Mosberger,et al.  httperf—a tool for measuring web server performance , 1998, PERV.

[6]  C. Amza,et al.  Specification and implementation of dynamic Web site benchmarks , 2002, 2002 IEEE International Workshop on Workload Characterization.

[7]  David E. Culler,et al.  SEDA: an architecture for well-conditioned, scalable internet services , 2001, SOSP.

[8]  Jordi Torres,et al.  Evaluating the scalability of Java event-driven Web servers , 2004, International Conference on Parallel Processing, 2004. ICPP 2004..

[9]  Prasant Mohapatra,et al.  Session-based overload control in QoS-aware Web servers , 2002, Proceedings.Twenty-First Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies.

[10]  Paul Barford,et al.  Generating representative Web workloads for network and server performance evaluation , 1998, SIGMETRICS '98/PERFORMANCE '98.

[11]  Jordi Torres,et al.  Characterizing secure dynamic Web applications scalability , 2005, 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium.