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

In early sections of this book, the authors introduce the basic concepts of capacity planning and some of the Web-specific issues that you must overcome for effective planning. (For instance, Web traffic is "bursty"--as any Webmaster will attest--and can fluctuate greatly.) Short chapters on system architectures, from traditional client servers to today's Web-centered thin clients, are discussed, as are the basics of TCP/IP and HTTP.

Subsequent sections discuss how to measure performance on your system, using tools such as Web benchmarks, and how to provide formulas for estimating how much hardware is required for "acceptable" performance.

Throughout Capacity Planning for Web Performance, there's a fair amount of mathematical detail. Though there are plenty of real-world examples, this is not a guide to just tweaking Web servers; this is a highly technical guide to state-of-the-art thinking on issues of measuring performance on the Internet. Applying metrics to Web performance can benefit any Web-minded business, though it will probably take the technically savvy reader to effectively execute this knowledge. --Richard Dragan

Product Description
Uses quantitative methods to analyze client/server and Web-based applications, leading the capacity planner in a step-by-step fashion through the process of determining the most cost-effective system configurations and networking architectures. CD-ROM included. Paper. DLC: Computer capacity - PLanning.

Michael Czeiszperger
Web Performance, Inc. Stress Testing Software
http://www.webperformanceinc.com


Very useful book for performance modeling   July 11, 2001
Al Fattah (Walnut Creek, CA United States)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful

I found the book very useful. It acted as both a refresher on the queuing theory and as a reference book.

The only thing I have agnist the book is that I wish it had some more advanced examples. I found the examples a bit simple and theoritical. Such examples are needed to understand the theory.But more real life examples would have shown how to structure the problems in the first place.


Good introduction for the beginner   June 12, 2001
Dr. Lee D. Carlson (Saint Louis, Missouri USA)
16 out of 16 found this review helpful

The modeling of the Internet has become extremely important in recent years as it continues to grow in leaps and bounds. Network architects have to become very aware of the performance issues when they design networks that will be integrated into this elaborate spider of clients, servers, routers, and switches. The issues in the modeling of global networks are extremely complex and involve very advanced mathematical techniques in order to do the job effectively. The authors of this book however have written an introduction to Web modeling that is written at a level appropriate for network designers and the beginning modeling engineer. They employ Excel spreadsheets and C code to assist in the modeling efforts, and these packages are available on an accompanying CD.

After a brief discussion of the issues concerning capacity planning, Web server, Intranet, and ISP performance in Chapter 1, the authors move on to defining and characterizing client/server systems in the next chapter. After a brief overview of the history of the Internet, they discuss LANs and WANs, and a quick treatment of protocols. The TCP protocol is considered in somewhat more detail because of its importance in network performance.

The quantitative analysis of performance in client/server environments is begun in chapter 3, wherein the authors begin with communication-processing delay diagrams to illustrate how requests spend time at each resource. This is done for both a 2-tier and a 3-tier C/S architecture, and the authors detail how disk subsystems contribute to the service time at a disk. An elementary iteration technique is used to compute the disk utilization. A very interesting and detailed discussion of the RAID-5 disk array is given. Some elementary queuing theory is discussed, using the assumption of flow equilibrium. A simplified summary of the utilization, forced flow, service demand, and Little's laws is also given without resorting to complicated mathematics.

Performance issues in Intranets and Web servers are the topic of the next chapter, and most importantly, the authors outline the differences between HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1. The role of the proxy server and its contribution to performance is also discussed, along with Web cluster architectures. The authors first mention the role of burstiness in this chapter, but do not give an in-depth mathematical discussion.

In chapter 5, the authors give a step-by-step methodology for capacity planning for C/S systems. Workload characterization, data collection issues, model validation, and forecasting are all discussed quantitatively with more details in later chapters.

How to characterize the workload quantitatively is the subject of the next chapter, in terms of a business, functional, and resource-oriented methodology. The authors discuss briefly workload models from a non-mathematical point of view, with parametrized models given the emphasis. The calculation of the parameters is given a more detailed and mathematical treatment, with distance measures and clustering algorithms outlined. Self-similarity in network traffic is first mentioned here, but not discussed from a rigorous mathematical perspective. The authors do however give a rudimentary method for calculating the burstiness.

Benchmarking is discussed in Chapter 7, with the authors detailing the most common approaches to this activity, and mention the most cited benchmark sources, including SPEC, TPC, AIM, and NNBB. The authors divide benchmarks into two categories, component-level and system-level, and discuss CPU performance benchmarking, file server performance, and transaction processing systems as examples of these two categories. Web server benchmarking is also discussed in the context of the two most popular benchmarks: Webstone and SPECweb. Webstone uses Little’s Law to derive a metric called Little’s Load Factor, which gives the average number of connections open at the Web server at a particular time during a network test. Their discussion is very helpful for network modelers who need an introduction to the current benchmarks used in network testing and planning.

The authors fortunately get even more mathematical in the next two chapters on system-level and component-level performance models. Various queuing models are analyzed assuming operational equilibrium, which the authors assume for all models in the book, and which means that the number of requests initially is equal to the number at the end of the observation interval. State transition diagrams are introduced, but the mathematical formalism used is not based on one from stochastic processes, but instead is more phenomenological. The authors employ mean value analysis to solve closed queuing networks with the EXCEL spreadsheets nicely illustrating the results.....

The last chapter of the book discusses how to obtain network performance data experimentally. This can be a difficult task, but the authors do a good job of discussing the possible strategies one can use to collect this data, and give a brief overview of the commercially available network monitors available for this purpose. The difficult job of parameter estimation using measurement data is also discussed in some detail. The authors refer to their other book however for a more thorough treatment of validation and calibration techniques.

The authors have written a fine book here, and will serve well the person first beginning in network modeling and the network designer who needs to understand performance issues. After reading this book, and with some more mathematical preparation, readers can then move on to more sophisticated treatments of the mathematical and simulation modeling of networks.


THE best book I've seen on queueing theory and the web   May 19, 1999
17 out of 20 found this review helpful

Easy enough for any IT person to understand yet detailed enough for real world capacity planning. It doesn't favor any hardware or software but drills in on ways to measure any of them.


Excellent Tutorial and Reference for Web Performance Models   November 21, 1998
Ted Hruzd (New Jersey)
24 out of 24 found this review helpful

If you thought Web architectures were too complex for modeling, you are wrong ! This text explains all possible major components of Web transactions - from TCP/IP, http, CGI, proxy and cache servers, browsers, and networks, in detail. It also explains and adapts various utilization, queue, and response time models to performance analysis and capacity projections. This text is outstanding as both a tutorial and reference. Particularly useful are many real world examples with solutions based on the models. The models are available as Excel worksheets. I recommend this text for all who are serious about designing Web applications that scale well and that are responsive to users. --- Ted Hruzd, performance analysis / capacity planning in the securities industry since 1984; platforms: Tandem, HP UX, and NT --- thruzd@hotmail.com