1 Issues in Server Farm Design for Real Time E-commerce Transactions

Server farms constitute the heart of any e-commerce site. This paper evaluates the performance of server farm systems for handling real-time transactions. The paper uses a simulated environment to implement server farms and tests the performance for various design policies and parameters. These design choices include scheduling policy, priority allocation, priority handling, number of machines in server farm, network delays and transaction mix. Results indicate that the prudent policies that schedule all transactions perform very well for low load conditions but fare badly for high load conditions. Simulation also found that some network latency actually improves system performance when the variance in task arrival rates is high. This paper demonstrates that performance of server farm system is contingent on the design choices made during the implementation of the system. 3