Workload characterization for an E-commerce web site

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 paper, 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...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: CASCON
• Authors: Qing Wang, Dwight J. Makaroff, H. Keith Edwards, Ryan Thompson
• Keywords: CASCON 2003, CASCON 2007, Image files, Popular Image files, Small Image files