Workload characterization for an E-commerce web site

  • Authors:
  • Qing Wang;Dwight Makaroff;H. Keith Edwards;Ryan Thompson

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A9, Canada;Department of Computer Sciecne, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A9, Canada;Department of Computer Science, University of Western Ontario, London, ON N6A 5B7, Canada;SaskNow Technologies, Saskatoon, SK, S7K 1Y4, Canada

  • Venue:
  • CASCON '03 Proceedings of the 2003 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Electronic commerce servers have a significant presence in today's Internet. Corporations require good performance for their business processes. To date, little empirical evidence has been discovered which identifies the types requests that users make of E-commerce systems. In this papers we examine the request level characteristics of the web site of a multinational car-rental company based on a 24 hour web server log. Our main conclusions are: i) An E-commerce web page typically contains many small image files and some popular image files are always requested together; ii) The percentage of requests for each service tends to be stable throughout the day when the time scale is large enough (10 minutes in this case); iii) Significant proportions of the requests are for dynamic pages and require the Secure Socket Layer protocol (SSL); and iv) most web objects are either requested primarily through SSL or primarily through non-SSL.One of the performance implications with respect to the image request patterns is that these image files should be bundled to reduce the number of requests a client issues as well as the server overhead to transfer these small image files separately. The server should arrange its resource allocation taking the request mix into account in order to improve performance. Finally, the use of SSL with respect to the various objects suggests that further study is needed to determine for which pages it is appropriate to use these security measures as they have both performance and security implications.