Chapter 95 - Issues and Evaluations of Caching Solutions for Web Application Acceleration

Abstract

Response time and reliability are two key points of differentiation among e-commerce Web sites. In business terms, the brand name of an e-commerce site is correlated to the type of experience users receive. The need to account for users' quality perception in designing Web servers for e-commerce systems has been highlighted in this chapter. Snafus and slow-downs at major Web sites during special events or peak times demonstrate the difficulty of scaling up e-commerce sites. Slow response times and down times can be devastating for e-commerce sites. In technical terms, ensuring the timely delivery of fresh dynamic content to end-users and engineering highly scalable e-commerce Web sites for special peak access times put heavy demand on IT staff. This is compounded by the ever-changing complexity of e-commerce applications. For many e-commerce applications, Web pages are created dynamically based on the current state of a business, such as product prices and inventory, stored in database systems. This characteristic requires e-commerce Web sites to deploy cache servers, Web servers, application servers, and database systems at the backend.