Characterizing the scalability of a large web-based shopping system

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of five days of workload data from a large Web-based shopping system. The multitier environment of this Web-based shopping system includes Web servers, application servers, database servers, and an assortment of load-balancing and firewall appliances. We characterize user requests and sessions and determine their impact on system performance scalability. The purpose of our study is to assess scalability and support capacity planning exercises for the multitier system. We find that horizontal scalability is not always an adequate mechanism for supporting increased workloads and that personalization and robots can have a significant impact on system scalability.