Capacity Planning for Web Performance: Models, Metrics and Methods

This book will discuss the problem of Capacity Planning and Performance Analysis in Web Server, Inranet and Client/Server environments. It will identify problem areas where capacity planning and performance analysis are critical concerns: arrival rate, through-put, response time, service demand, workload, delay, bottleneck, and saturation. It will discuss protocol (HTTP & TCP/IP) and workloads (access to HTML documents, graphics, etc.). It will show how to access existing capacities and how to plan for future capacities. It will discuss benchmarking metrics, global systems problems, workload forecasting, etc.

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"This excellent book presents a new way to model, analyze, and plan for these new performance problems associated with the Web's bursty and highly-skewed load characteristics. A valuable resource for students and for Web administrators." -- Jim Gray, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research

"Many have said that the Web is too amorphous and chaotic to permit meaningful performance forecasts. Menasce and Almeida demolish this myth. Throughput, response time, and congestion can be measured and predicted, all using familiar tools from queueing networks that you can run on your own computer. There is no other book like this. It is a first." -- Peter J. Denning, Professor of Computer Science, George Mason University and former President of the ACM

"This book takes the mystery out of analyzing Web performance. The authors have skillfully culled through more than a 25 years of research, and selected the results most critical to Web performance, and developed important new material that deals directly with the special properties of applications that run on the Web. With everything together in a single volume, Menasce and Almeida have created a superb starting point for anyone wishing to explore the world of Web performance." -- Jeffrey P. Buzen, Chief Scientist and CoFounder, BGS Systems

"This is a welcome approach to the performance analysis of today's web-based Internet. It is a useful and practical treatment that is eminently accessible to the non-mathematical professional. An impressive feature the authors provide is to deal directly with the fractal nature of web-based traffic; no simple and practical treatment has been offered before, and theirs is a timely contribution." -- Leonard Kleinrock, Professor of Computer Science, UCLA

As more and more businesses rely on distributed client/server and Web-based applications, performance considerations become extremely important. Capacity Planning for Web Performance uses quantitative methods to analyze these systems. It leads the capacity planner, in a step-by-step fashion, through the process of determining the most cost-effective system configurations and networking architectures. The quantitative methods lead to the development of performance-predictive models for capacity planning. Instead of relying on intuition, ad hoc procedures, and rules of thumb, Capacity Planning for Web Performance provides a uniform and sound way for dealing with performance problems. A large number of numeric and practical examples help the reader understand the quantitative approach adopted here.

Includes a CD-ROM containing several Microsoft Excel(r) workbooks supported by Visual Basic(r) modules, samples of http logs, and programs to process them. The Excel workbooks allow the readers to immediately put into practice the methods and models discussed here.

Includes the following tools for analyzing client/server systems, intranets, and Internet Web sites:

• Performance-oriented analysis of network protocols
• Modeling of delays
• Workload characterization and forecasting
• Use of industry-standard benchmarks
• Queuing network-based models