- The Emergence of Web Applications
- Basic Definitions
- The Nature of the Web and Its Challenges
- Performance and Scalability
- Performance
- Scalability
- The Internet Medium
- Wide Audience
- Interactive
- Dynamic
- Always On
- Integrated
- Lack of Complete Control
- Measuring Performance and Scalability
- Measuring Performance
- Beyond Benchmarking
- Measuring Scalability
- Throughput and Price/Performance
- Scalability and Performance Hints
- Think End-to-End
- Scalability Doesn't Equal Performance
- Summary
Summary
In this first chapter, we focused on defining Web applications and the nature of their deployment on the Internet. We also defined and discussed performance and scalabilitytwo important concepts that will remain our focus throughout this bookand described their related metrics.
One very important subtheme of this chapter was the focus on the entire application, not just its parts. Although it may be academically interesting to optimize our bandwidth or CPU use, the end user does not care about such things. Instead, he or she thinks only in terms of time, that is, whether the application is fast. And he or she wants that same response time regardless of how many other users are on the system at the same time. Now that we are focused on the goal of end-to-end performance and scalability, let's move on to talk in more detail about application architectures and the specific challenges that lie ahead.