Evaluating the impact of reactivity on the performance of Web applications

The great success of the Internet has raised new challenges in terms of applications and the satisfaction of their users. In fact, there is strong evidence that a significant part of the user behavior depends on its satisfaction. Users reactions may affect the load of a server, establishing successive interactions where the user behavior affects the system behavior and vice-versa. It is important to understand this interactive process to design systems more suited to user requirements. In this work we study and explain how this reactive interaction is performed by users and how it affects the system´s performance. We perform experiments using a real server under a TPC-W-based workload generated using a reactive version of httperf. We also simulate different workload configurations in order to evaluate the effects on the system´s load. The results show that accounting for reactivity causes a significant impact on the server´s performance in terms of throughput and response time, raising the possibility of performance improvement of Web systems by considering reactivity