Measuring Performance of Web Applications: Empirical Techniques and Results

Performance of web applications is a key determinant of operating costs, quality of user experience, and, therefore of business outcome for any web site. Objective procedures for testing web applications alone have not been found in the literature. A procedure has been developed for making such measurements. This paper reports further progress in measuring performance of web applications in a laboratory local-area-network (LAN) environment. Experimental procedures and data analysis have been refined. Test workloads have been improved so as to provide more intensive, and more varied demands on the server web application. Recent results are reported, which show that there are significant differences in performance among web application classes, depending on the type of data requested.