| N-tier e-commerce environments present unique performance and scalability challenges under highly variable transactional loads. This thesis investigates Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) as a tactic to manage transactional peaks and valleys in a "bursty" environment that has suffered from content delivery-related performance, scalability and, ultimately, availability problems during key selling seasons. We established monitoring infrastructure that consists of client (browser) and server-side performance monitors as well as server and network resource utilization measurements in order to gauge the full impact of our chosen CDN on response times, bandwidth utilization and CPU utilization.;We ran a series of controlled experiments to establish performance and scalability gains at the Java EE component level and HTML object level of granularity. Our results suggest a 30 percent improvement in page response times, a four-fold improvement in bandwidth utilization and Web server CPU utilization reduction of almost 90 percent. At the same time, we were able to sustain twice the amount of Web traffic with zero outages and the exact same hardware footprint year-over-year. Our conclusions are applicable to many other n-tier e-commerce environments that suffer from content delivery issues. |
