Performance evaluation of multi-tier Web clusters

People

• Michele Colajanni
• Mauro Andreolini
• Riccardo Lancellotti
• Sara Casolari

The need to optimize the performance of Web-based services is producing a variety of novel architectures for high performance and scalable servers and networks, ranging from Web clusters distributed in a LAN environment, to multi-clusters distributed over the Internet, to Content Distribution Networks.

One of the key issues is the evaluation of the performance and scalability of these systems under realistic workload conditions. The following research proposal identifies the main requirements associated with a benchmarking study of distributed architectures supporting highly accessed Web sites.

We discuss the performance tradeoffs of various options in the design and operation of scalable Web systems through the presentation of some case studies related to locally distributed systems, including the performance analysis of multi-tier architectures.

Our study leads us to conclude that most of the considered benchmarking tools work properly when they are used to analyze a single server system (in many cases even a single-tier architecture), but none of them is able to address all issues related to the performance analysis of the most recent distributed and multi-tier Web systems.

Selected Papers

This page includes a selected list of publications since 2002. Publications not available online can be requested to the authors.

• Mauro Andreolini, Sara Casolari, Michele Colajanni, "A distributed architecture for gracefully degradable Web-based services", Proc. of the 5th IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications, (IEEE NCA06), Cambridge, MA, USA, July 24-26 2006.
• Mauro Andreolini, Michele Colajanni, Riccardo Lancellotti, "Web system reliability and performance: design and testing methodologies", invited book chapter in "Web Engineering - Theory and practice of metrics and measurement for Web development" (E. Mendes and N. Mosley Eds.), Springer Verlag, 2005
• Mauro Andreolini, Michele Colajanni, Riccardo Lancellotti, Francesca Mazzoni, "Fine grain performance evaluation of e-commerce sites" ACM Performance Evaluation Review, Special Issue on "E-Commerce", vol. 32, no. 3 December 2004
• Michele Colajanni, Mauro Andreolini, Valeria Cardellini, "Benchmarking of locally and geographically distributed Web-server systems", Tutorial presented at 12th Int'l World Wide Web Conf. (WWW2003), Budapest, Hungary, May 2003
• Mauro Andreolini, Valeria Cardellini, Michele Colajanni, "Benchmarking models and tools for distributed Web-server systems", Performance Evaluation of Complex Systems: Techniques and Tools, M. C. Calzarossa and S. Tucci eds., Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2459, pp. 208-235, Springer-Verlag, Sept. 2002