Ranking Configuration Parameters in Multi-Tiered E-Commerce Sites

摘要

E-commerce systems are composed of many components with several configurable parameters that, if properly configured, can optimize system performance. Before upgrading existing systems to overcome performance bottlenecks, several areas of a site's architecture and its parameters may be adjusted to improve performance. This paper provides a method to rank key configurable e-commerce system parameters that significantly impact overall system performance, and the performance of the most significant Web function types. We consider both on-line and off-line parameters at each of the e-commerce system layers: Web server, application server, and database server. In order to accomplish our task, we designed a practical, ad-hoc approach that involves conducting experiments on a testbed system setup as a small e-commerce site. The configurable parameters are ranked based on their degrees of performance improvement to the system and to the most critical Web functions. The performance metrics of interest include server's response time, system throughput, and probability of rejecting a customer's request. The experiments were conducted on an e-commerce site compliant to the TPC-W benchmark.