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Rating: 
Summary: Very useful book for performance modeling
Review: I found the book very useful. It acted as both a refresher on the queuing theory and as a reference book. The only thing I have agnist the book is that I wish it had some more advanced examples. I found the examples a bit simple and theoritical. Such examples are needed to understand the theory.But more real life examples would have shown how to structure the problems in the first place.
Rating: 
Summary: THE best book I've seen on queueing theory and the web
Review: If you thought Web architectures were too complex for modeling, you are wrong ! This text explains all possible major components of Web transactions - from TCP/IP, http, CGI, proxy and cache servers, browsers, and networks, in detail. It also explains and adapts various utilization, queue, and response time models to performance analysis and capacity projections. This text is outstanding as both a tutorial and reference. Particularly useful are many real world examples with solutions based on the models. The models are available as Excel worksheets. I recommend this text for all who are serious about designing Web applications that scale well and that are responsive to users. --- Ted Hruzd, performance analysis / capacity planning in the securities industry since 1984; platforms: Tandem, HP UX, and NT --- thruzd@hotmail.com
Rating:
Summary: Good introduction for the beginner
Review: The modeling of the Internet has become extremely important in recent years as it continues to grow in leaps and bounds. Network architects have to become very aware of the performance issues when they design networks that will be integrated into this elaborate spider of clients, servers, routers, and switches. The issues in the modeling of global networks are extremely complex and involve very advanced mathematical techniques in order to do the job effectively. The authors of this book however have written an introduction to Web modeling that is written at a level appropriate for network designers and the beginning modeling engineer. They employ Excel spreadsheets and C code to assist in the modeling efforts, and these packages are available on an accompanying CD. After a brief discussion of the issues concerning capacity planning, Web server, Intranet, and ISP performance in Chapter 1, the authors move on to defining and characterizing client/server systems in the next chapter. After a brief overview of the history of the Internet, they discuss LANs and WANs, and a quick treatment of protocols. The TCP protocol is considered in somewhat more detail because of its importance in network performance. The quantitative analysis of performance in client/server environments is begun in chapter 3, wherein the authors begin with communication-processing delay diagrams to illustrate how requests spend time at each resource. This is done for both a 2-tier and a 3-tier C/S architecture, and the authors detail how disk subsystems contribute to the service time at a disk. An elementary iteration technique is used to compute the disk utilization. A very interesting and detailed discussion of the RAID-5 disk array is given. Some elementary queuing theory is discussed, using the assumption of flow equilibrium. A simplified summary of the utilization, forced flow, service demand, and Little's laws is also given without resorting to complicated mathematics. Performance issues in Intranets and Web servers are the topic of the next chapter, and most importantly, the authors outline the differences between HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1. The role of the proxy server and its contribution to performance is also discussed, along with Web cluster architectures. The authors first mention the role of burstiness in this chapter, but do not give an in-depth mathematical discussion. In chapter 5, the authors give a step-by-step methodology for capacity planning for C/S systems. Workload characterization, data collection issues, model validation, and forecasting are all discussed quantitatively with more details in later chapters. How to characterize the workload quantitatively is the subject of the next chapter, in terms of a business, functional, and resource-oriented methodology. The authors discuss briefly workload models from a non-mathematical point of view, with parametrized models given the emphasis. The calculation of the parameters is given a more detailed and mathematical treatment, with distance measures and clustering algorithms outlined. Self-similarity in network traffic is first mentioned here, but not discussed from a rigorous mathematical perspective. The authors do however give a rudimentary method for calculating the burstiness. Benchmarking is discussed in Chapter 7, with the authors detailing the most common approaches to this activity, and mention the most cited benchmark sources, including SPEC, TPC, AIM, and NNBB. The authors divide benchmarks into two categories, component-level and system-level, and discuss CPU performance benchmarking, file server performance, and transaction processing systems as examples of these two categories. Web server benchmarking is also discussed in the context of the two most popular benchmarks: Webstone and SPECweb. Webstone uses Little’s Law to derive a metric called Little’s Load Factor, which gives the average number of connections open at the Web server at a particular time during a network test. Their discussion is very helpful for network modelers who need an introduction to the current benchmarks used in network testing and planning. The authors fortunately get even more mathematical in the next two chapters on system-level and component-level performance models. Various queuing models are analyzed assuming operational equilibrium, which the authors assume for all models in the book, and which means that the number of requests initially is equal to the number at the end of the observation interval. State transition diagrams are introduced, but the mathematical formalism used is not based on one from stochastic processes, but instead is more phenomenological. The authors employ mean value analysis to solve closed queuing networks with the EXCEL spreadsheets nicely illustrating the results..... The last chapter of the book discusses how to obtain network performance data experimentally. This can be a difficult task, but the authors do a good job of discussing the possible strategies one can use to collect this data, and give a brief overview of the commercially available network monitors available for this purpose. The difficult job of parameter estimation using measurement data is also discussed in some detail. The authors refer to their other book however for a more thorough treatment of validation and calibration techniques. The authors have written a fine book here, and will serve well the person first beginning in network modeling and the network designer who needs to understand performance issues. After reading this book, and with some more mathematical preparation, readers can then move on to more sophisticated treatments of the mathematical and simulation modeling of networks.
Rating:
Summary: Good collection of engineering articles
Review: This book is a collection of technical articles on the theory of performance testing, and a good addition to the library of someone interested in the scientific and engineering aspects of web performance. If you're interested in a HOWTO on web performance there are a variety of better books, including Speed up Your Site: Web Site Optimization by King and Nielson. Michael Czeiszperger
Web Performance, Inc. Stress Testing Software
http://www.webperformanceinc.com
Rating:
Summary: Good collection of engineering articles
Review: This book is a collection of technical articles on the theory of performance testing, and a good addition to the library of someone interested in the scientific and engineering aspects of web performance. If you're interested in a HOWTO on web performance there are a variety of better books, including Speed up Your Site: Web Site Optimization by King and Nielson. Michael Czeiszperger
Web Performance, Inc. Stress Testing Software
http://www.webperformanceinc.com
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