Capacity Planning for Web Performance: Metrics, Models, and Methods - Softcover

Reader Reviews From: Peter J. Denning Many have said that the Web is too amorphous and chaotic to permit meaningful performance forecasts. Almeida and Menasce demolish this myth. Throughput, response time, and congestion can be measured and predicted, all using familiar tools from queuing networks that you can run on your own computer. There is no other book like this. It is a first. Quote by Leonard Kleinrock, Professor of Computer Science, UCLA "This is a welcome approach to the performance analysis of todays 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." From: Jim Gray, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research "This excellent book gives a quantitative and pragmatic approach to measuring, analyzing, and understanding web servers. It presents a good tutorial on the performance issues of web servers, and presents the analytic tools needed to model them. Web servers have bursty and highly-skewed load characteristics. This book presents a new way to model, analyze, and plan for these new performance problems. The book is a valuable resource for students and for web-administrators." From: Jeffrey P. Buzen, Chief Scientist and CoFounder BGS Systems "This book takes the mystery out of analyzing Web performance. The authors have skillfully culled through more than "a" DELETE twenty-five years of performance related research, and have selected the results that are most critical to Web performance. They have also 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".

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.