Princeton ACM / IEEE Computer Society Meeting

PRINCETON ACM / IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY CHAPTERS
DECEMBER 1999 JOINT MEETING
Performance Planning for Web Servers

Paul Reeser

Web servers play an integral role in Internet commerce and telecommunications service offerings. Web servers are portals to external customers (over the Internet), and they are also an interface to internal agents (over corporate Intranets). In many modern telecommunications applications, the Web server is as a vehicle to provide a "unified desktop" interface for customer care (CC) agents. The CC agents will access a myriad of incompatible Operations Support System (OSS) applications for customer workflow processing (ordering, provisioning, billing, ticketing, etc).

Typically, these Web servers provide

access to distributed OSS logic and data via an OO middleware layer,
integration of the resulting data objects via a servlet/script engine component, and
dynamic construction and presentation of the unified results to active CC agents.

This talk discusses many critical aspects of end-to-end capacity/performance planning for such Web-based architectures, and (time permitting) presents a queueing model for Web servers in distributed environments. The modeling results lead to a fast and accurate analytic approximation for the key end-user performance measures.

Paul Reeser is a Technology Consultant in the Network Design & Performance Analysis Department in the Advanced Technologies Lab of AT&T Labs. He has been involved in performance-based work in AT&T products and services for the past 18 years. Paul's current technical and research interests lie in the areas of Internet server performance modeling, distributed IP network scalability analysis, IP platform performance and reliability engineering, and loss systems with retrials.

Date: Thursday, December 16, 1999, 8:00 pm
Location: Auditorium, Sarnoff Corporation, 201 Washington Road (Rt 571 1/4 mile south of US 1), Princeton, NJ

Additional Information: recorded info (609) 924-8704, Dennis Mancl (908) 582-7086, or David Soll (215) 854-3461

A pre-meeting dinner with the speaker is held at 6 p.m. at the Rusty Scupper on Alexander Road in Princeton. If you would like to attend, please call the information number to record your reservation on the answering machine.

Princeton ACM / IEEE Computer Society meeting are open to the public. Students and their parents are welcome. There is no admission charge, and refreshments are served.