Impact of memory technology trends on performance of Web systems

Abstract

The hardware technology continues to improve at a considerable rate. Besides the Moore law increments of the CPU speed, it should be considered that the capacity of the main memory in the last years is increasing at an even more impressive rate. One of the consequences of a continuous increment of memory resource is that we can design and implement memory-embedded Web sites, where both the static resources and the database information are kept in main memory. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of memory trends on the performance of e-commerce sites that continue to be an important reference for Internet-based services in terms of complexity of the hardware/software technology and in terms of performance, availability and scalability requirements. However, most results are valid even for other Web-based 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 the Web site data. This analysis allows us to anticipate the interventions on the hardware/software components that could improve the capacity of present and future Web systems for content generation and delivery.