8 - Tuning e-commerce applications

Abstract

This chapter describes the fundamental architecture underlying every e-commerce system and reviews the tuning considerations that apply to that architecture. E-commerce applications often have a three-tiered architecture consisting of Web servers, application servers, and database servers. Web servers are responsible for presentation. They call functions from the underlying application servers via server extensions such as servlets or dynamic HTML interpreters such as ASE. They deliver HTML or XML pages back to the client browsers. The application servers are responsible for the business logic. They implement the functions exposed to the clients. Typically, these functions include search, update shopping cart, pay, or create account. Each function uses data from a local cache or from the underlying database server and outputs HTML or XML pages. The database servers perform data access. The queries that the application servers submit to the database servers are characterized in the chapter; and capacity planning is also reviewed.