and

Performance Comparison of Web-based Database Access

Gabriele KOTSIS

Department for Telecooperation, Johannes Kepler University

Linz, A-4040, Austria

Email: gk@tk.uni-linz.ac.at

and

Lukas TAFERNER

Abteilung für Wirtschaftsinformatik, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien

Vienna, A-1090, Austria

Email: h9551164@gutemine.wu-wien.ac.at

ABSTRACT

In the recent decade the internet has gained importance as a medium for information and entertainment. Many ‘old economy’ enterprises discovered new possibilities to reduce e.g. advertisement costs taking advantage of this new medium. A lot of ‘new economy’ enterprises were founded in order to base their business model solely on advantages the Internet offers. In such an environment where turnover is generated by the users visiting a web site or purchasing goods or services using a web site, performance and uptime are crucial factors for being successful. As recent events have shown, a downtime due to hard / software failure or Denial of Service attacks causes the loss of transactions and turnover during the downtime and may inflict a considerable damage to a company’s public image. In this paper we demonstrate a systematic approach for evaluating the performance of a web server. We will apply this approach in the analysis of an existing Web Site, serving mainly requests involving data base transactions. The objective of the case study is to identify the most performing technique for web-based data base access.

Keyword s: n-tier-architecture, php, java, xsp, web benchmarking, performance of e-commerce services, case study.

1.INTRODUCTION

The World Wide Web (www), which originally was nothing more but a system allowing researchers to link static documents together by hyperlinks, turned out to be an interesting place for all types of companies to advertise their products on one hand and to interact with potential customers on the other hand. Hypertext Markup Language is due to its static nature not able to fulfil those needs. Powerful server-sided applications were needed in order to add interactivity to static web sites. The first well known evolved in the early 1990ies, the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), later on other powerful applications like PHP, ASP, JAVA and Cold Fusion where developed [1]. These applications provide the technology needed for E-Commerce, supporting interaction with database systems, presentation of content dynamically and responsiveness to users inputs. These applications are often very resource intensive, they have to retrieve information from databases, prepare and layout the information as desired and present it to the user. Especially web-servers of big companies such as Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, but also search engines such as and have to serve a couple of million users per day, causing heavy load on the servers. The consequences for a website of delivering poor performance or being 'down', even only for a couple of minutes can be ruinous. The total loss caused by denial of service in 2000 amounted to almost 8.3 million US$ [Att00]. Considering these figures, which include only reported incidences, and adding the loss that cannot be measured (loss of customers confidence, loss of brand) make it worth to consider strategies to prevent those scenarios.

In this paper we will have a closer look at the factors influencing web server performance and the options a Webmaster has to find the most suitable solution for a web project. First, we will explain the principles and concepts of web server performance evaluation, and introduce the components that are responsible for the performance of a web application. In the next section, the case study used in the evaluation will be briefly presented. The major part of the paper is dedicated to the description and interpretation of the performance tests. We conclude with a summary of results and some general insights that could be derived from the case study.

2.BASICS IN WEB PERFORMANCE

EVALUATION

A typical (web) performance evaluation life cycle [2] starts with the definition of the system under study and the goals of the study along with a specification of the performance metrics to be considered. In this work, we will focus on multi-tier architectures, which are typical for nowadays web-based e-commerce sites. This architecture can be represented as shown in Figure 1. The main components to be considered in the performance evaluation are the users´ client, the network connecting clients and servers (typically the internet), the web server, the web application server, the D

B management system as well as the network linking the web server, the web application server and the DB system if those system components do not reside on the same machine.

The first performance metrics of interest is response time, which is defined as the time between the