Capacity Planning for Web Performance: Metrics, Models, and Methods

Given your server hardware and Internet connection, how many users can your Web site handle? Capacity Planning for Web Performance can show you the techniques for estimating and planning effectively for your Web site's workload, both for today and tomorrow. This textbook-style treatment of the topic presents concepts and formulas for making sure your Web infrastructure is up to the task.

In early sections of this book, the authors introduce the basic concepts of capacity planning and some of the Web-specific issues that you must overcome for effective planning. (For instance, Web traffic is "bursty"--as any Webmaster will attest--and can fluctuate greatly.) Short chapters on system architectures, from traditional client servers to today's Web-centered thin clients, are discussed, as are the basics of TCP/IP and HTTP.

Subsequent sections discuss how to measure performance on your system, using tools such as Web benchmarks, and how to provide formulas for estimating how much hardware is required for "acceptable" performance.

Throughout Capacity Planning for Web Performance, there's a fair amount of mathematical detail. Though there are plenty of real-world examples, this is not a guide to just tweaking Web servers; this is a highly technical guide to state-of-the-art thinking on issues of measuring performance on the Internet. Applying metrics to Web performance can benefit any Web-minded business, though it will probably take the technically savvy reader to effectively execute this knowledge. --Richard Dragan