In 1999, slow E-commerce sites cost their owners $44 billion in lost revenue -- and site failures have embarrassed companies from Britannica to eBay, Victoria's Secret to Charles Schwab. In Scaling for e-Business, two of the world's leading Web performance experts present powerful techniques for characterizing, predicting, anticipating, and addressing every aspect of E-commerce site performance. Scaling for e-Business demonstrates how to characterize E-commerce workloads more accurately than any book published yet. It clearly demonstrates techniques for analyzing the performance of authentication and payment services; modeling contention for software servers; modeling and planning for communications infrastructure; and most importantly, forecasting and addressing peak demand. Finally, the Web/E-Commerce developer will discover how to evaluate and project the long-term impact of changes in his/her site visitor profile -- even the growth of non-PC devices and traffic from "intelligent agents" such as comparative shopping bots.
DANIEL A. MENASCÉ is Professor of Computer Science at George Mason University, and a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
VIRGILIO A. F. ALMEIDA is Professor of Computer Science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and formerly held visiting positions at Xerox PARC and Boston University.
The authors' interests include performance modeling and capacity planning for large-scale Web and e-commerce environments.