A hybrid Web server architecture for e-commerce applications

The performance of an e-commerce application can be measured according to technical metrics but also following business indicators. The revenue obtained by a commercial Web application is directly related to the amount of clients that complete business transactions. In technical terms, a business transaction is completed when a Web client successfully finishes a browsing session. In this paper we introduce a novel Web server architecture that combines the best aspects of both the multithreaded and the event-driven architectures, the two major existing alternatives, to create a server model that offers an improved performance in terms of user session completions without loosing the natural ease of programming characteristic of the multithreading paradigm. We describe the implementation of this architecture on the Tomcat 5.5 server and evaluate its performance. The obtained results demonstrate the feasibility of the hybrid architecture and the performance benefits that this model introduces for e-commerce applications.