| Summary: | A major contribution of this thesis is a general-purpose Internet Commerce performance benchmarking tool, ECBench. It is a design- stage software solution that enables the benchmarking of different e-commerce technologies and techniques. Using ECBench, an e-commerce application developer can evaluate competitive technologies. The criteria of choice would be how well they meet a set of QoS system requirements. ECBench is based on the TPC-W standard specification, thus providing a realistic model of an Internet Commerce system. A comprehensive set of metrics and experiment design facilities are provided in the tool to enable a detailed performance analysis of the e-commerce technologies and techniques which are benchmarked. To demonstrate the use of the ECBench, PHP and Java Servlets application server technologies have been incorporated into the tool and experiments have been designed and performed to investigate and compare the scalability of the two technologies. Another major contribution of the thesis is a novel Cost- based Admission Control solution (CBAC) to preserve QoS in Internet Commerce systems. CBAC is a dynamic software solution which uses a congestion control mechanism to maintain QoS while the system is online. Rather than rejecting customer requests in a high- load situation, a discount- charge model which is sensitive to system current load and navigational structure is used to encourage customers to postpone their requests. A scheduling mechanism with load forecasting is used to schedule user requests in more lightly loaded time periods. The effect of CBAC on QoS has been investigated by benchmarking it on ECBench. It has been found that the use of CBAC at high load achieves higher profit, better utilisation of system resources and service times competitive with those which are achievable during lightly loaded periods. Throughput is sustained at reasonable levels and request failure at high load is dramatically reduced.
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