Capacity Planning for Web Performance: Models, Metrics and Methods: Amazon.co.uk: Daniel A. Menasce, Virgilio A.F. Almeida: Books

Review

Reader Reviews From: Peter J. Denning Many have said that the Web is too amorphous and chaotic to permit meaningful performance forecasts. Almeida and Menasce demolish this myth. Throughput, response time, and congestion can be measured and predicted, all using familiar tools from queuing networks that you can run on your own computer. There is no other book like this. It is a first. Quote by Leonard Kleinrock, Professor of Computer Science, UCLA "This is a welcome approach to the performance analysis of todays web-based Internet. It is a useful and practical treatment that is eminently accessible to the non-mathematical professional. An impressive feature the authors provide is to deal directly with the fractal nature of web-based traffic; no simple and practical treatment has been offered before, and theirs is a timely contribution." From: Jim Gray, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research "This excellent book gives a quantitative and pragmatic approach to measuring, analyzing, and understanding web servers. It presents a good tutorial on the performance issues of web servers, and presents the analytic tools needed to model them. Web servers have bursty and highly-skewed load characteristics. This book presents a new way to model, analyze, and plan for these new performance problems. The book is a valuable resource for students and for web-administrators." From: Jeffrey P. Buzen, Chief Scientist and CoFounder BGS Systems "This book takes the mystery out of analyzing Web performance. The authors have skillfully culled through more than "a" DELETE twenty-five years of performance related research, and have selected the results that are most critical to Web performance. They have also developed important new material that deals directly with the special properties of applications that run on the Web. With everything together in a single volume, Menasce and Almeida have created a superb starting point for anyone wishing to explore the world of Web performance".

Product Description

This book will discuss the problem of Capacity Planning and Performance Analysis in Web Server, Inranet and Client/Server environments. It will identify problem areas where capacity planning and performance analysis are critical concerns: arrival rate, through-put, response time, service demand, workload, delay, bottleneck, and saturation. It will discuss protocol (HTTP & TCP/IP) and workloads (access to HTML documents, graphics, etc.). It will show how to access existing capacities and how to plan for future capacities. It will discuss benchmarking metrics, global systems problems, workload forecasting, etc.

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Excellent Tutorial and Reference for Web Performance Models 20 Nov 1998

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

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

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goes to the point and simplifies the modeling effort 17 Sep 1998

This is a great book that really simplifies the modeling of complex performance problems. The included CD-ROm contains several tools that allow prediction of throughput, response time, and bottlenecks.

A must for any serious web site architect. 17 Sep 1998

As a technical consultant in interactive solutions for a large systems integrator, I am confronted on every project with the capacity planning issues related to e-comm applications. The estimation of sizing and performance are often considered "too complex" and lead to high-level deliverables that eventually cannot serve as an acceptable basis for service level agreements in a company. This book, gives an a methodology that leads to metrics that model your system. The approach is practical and the accompanying examples (and excel spreadsheets) are very concrete. As I don't have the time to go back to the gory details of queuing theory, I find the formulas well explained and helpful to derive the required SLAs and other metrics needed to roll out a system where the performance is understood. Really useful!