A decision support system for tuning Web servers in distributed object oriented network architectures

  • Authors:
  • R. D. van der Mei;W. K. Ehrlich;P. K. Reeser;J. P. Francisco

  • Affiliations:
  • AT&T Labs, Middletown, NJ;AT&T Labs, Middletown, NJ;AT&T Labs, Middletown, NJ;AT&T Labs, Middletown, NJ

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Web technologies are currently being employed to provide end user interfaces in diverse computing environments. The core element of these Web solutions is a Web server that is based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) running over TCP/IP. Web servers are required to respond to millions of transaction requests per day at an "acceptable" Quality of Service (QoS) level with respect to the end-to-end response time and the server throughput. In many applications, the server performs significant server-side processing in distributed, object-oriented (OO) computing environments. In these applications, a Web server retrieves a file, parses the file for scripting language content, interprets the scripting statements and then executes embedded code, possibly requiring a TCP connection to a remote application for data transfer. In this paper, we present an end-to-end model that addresses this new class of Web servers that engage in OO computing. We have implemented the model in a simulation tool. Performance predictions based on the simulations are shown to match well with performance observed in a test environment. Therefore, the model forms an excellent basis for a Decision Support System for system architects, allowing them to predict the behavior of systems prior to their creation, or the behavior of existing systems under new load scenarios.