Impact of technology trends on the performance of current and future Web-based systems

The hardware technology continues to improve at a considerable rate. Besides the Moore law increments of the CPU speed, in the last years the capacity of the main memory is increasing at an even more impressive rate. One of the consequences of a continuous increment of the main memory resources is the possibility of designing and implementing memory-embedded Web sites in the near future, where both the static resources and the database information is kept in the main memory of the server machines. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of memory and network technology trends on the performance of e-commerce sites that continue to be an important reference for Web-based services in terms of complexity of the hardware/software technology and in terms of performance, availability and scalability requirements. However, most of the achieved considerations can be easily extended to other Webbased services. We demonstrate through experiments on a real system how the system bottlenecks change depending on the amount of memory that is (or will be) available for storing the information of a Web site, taking or not into account the effects of a WAN. This analysis allows us to anticipate some indications about the interventions on the hardware/software components that could improve the capacity of present and future Web-based services