Performance Comparison of Web-based Database Access

In the recent decade the internet has gained importance as a media for information and entertainment. Many old economy enterprises discovered new possibilities to reduce e.g. advertisement costs taking advantage of this new media, a lot of new economy enterprises were founded in order to base their business model solely on advantages the internet offers. In such an environment where turnover is generated by the users visiting a web site or purchasing goods or services using a web site, performance and uptime is a crucial factor for being successful. As recent events have shown, a downtime due to hard / software failure or DoS attacks causes the loss of transactions and turnover during the downtime and may inflict a considerable damage to a company's public image. In this paper we demonstrate a systematic approach for evaluating the performance of a web server. We will apply this approach in the analysis of an existing Web Site, serving mainly requests involving data base transactions. The objective of the case study is to identify the most performant technique for web-based data base access.