Modeling and Predicting End-to-End Response Times in Multi-tier Internet Applications

Many Internet applications employ multi-tier software architectures. The performance of such multi-tier Internet applications is typically measured by the end-toend response times. Most of the earlier works in modeling the response times of such systems have limited their study to modeling the mean. However, since the user-perceived performance is highly influenced by the variability in response times, the variance of the response times is important as well. We first develop a simple model for the end-to-end response times for multitiered Internet applications. We validate the model by real data from two large-scale applications that are widely deployed on the Internet. Second, we derive exact and approximate expressions for the mean and the variance, respectively, of the end-toend response times. Extensive numerical validation shows that the approximations match very well with simulations. These observations make the results presented highly useful for capacity planning and perform...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: TELETRAFFIC
• Authors: Sandjai Bhulai, Swaminathan Sivasubramanian, Robert D. van der Mei, Maarten van Steen
• Keywords: Computer Networks, End-toend Response Times, Internet Applications, Response Times, TELETRAFFIC 2007