One of the key aspects of a successful eCommerce initiative is performance.
While this is often overlooked or taken for granted very few customers will
return to a site that exhibits sluggish performance. Features, functions,
robust tools, etc. are all important to the success of an eCom site but in
the long run don't mean much if customers don't get efficient responses from
the site their shopping. This session discusses the eCommerce Performance
Management Lifecycle. This includes the key elements in understanding
customer/site dynamics and how to use this information to design an eCom
based performance testing benchmark (including the methodology that goes
along with it). This includes workload characteristics, transactional
definitions and site assumptions. A framework for eCom performance
benchmarking and the criteria that need be measured is also introduced.
Real world scenarios from a variety of sites are analyzed from the lessons
learned perspective.
The life cycle takes into account the 8 key elements of delivering and
maintaining a robust eCommerce environment. This includes understanding
customer behavior, setting performance goals, benchmarking, tuning and
adjusting for peak periods. The eCommerce Benchmark must be designed to
measure the key processes utilized during the customer shopping experience
(B2B and/or B2C). Industry experience and customer input must be
incorporated into the benchmark's design to represent the typical workload
placed on a Commerce server. Based on the results organizations can
predict how the site will perform under tough, real-world conditions. For
example, the benchmark must consider and measure the following granular
activities:
1. authenticating an existing user
2. registering a new user or changing the profile of an existing user
3. browsing a catalog by category and/or product
4. processing an order
5. accessing key site pages
6. searching for products, full text and parametric
7. adding, changing, deleting items from a shopping basket (or purchase order)
8. purchasing/processing a committed order.
These activities must be incorporated into a series of transactions that
measure round trip performance, execution under load and scalability. The
benchmark must be designed to measure transactional workloads that exercise
the key components utilized during an eCom session. This includes:
* concurrent browser sessions
* dynamic page generation with database access and update
* processing multiple web objects
* on-line transaction execution scenarios
* multiple databases consisting of complex relationships
* efficiently resolving resource contention
Consideration must be given to capturing and interpreting the collected
data. Translating these metrics into meaningful statistics provides the
information required to make key decisions. The following are examples of
what need be measured and reported:
1. orders per minute
2. registrations per minute
3. complex browsing per minute
4. simple browsing per minute
5. searches per minute
6. transactions per minute
7. dynamic vs. static pages served per minute
Finally, software and hardware environmental factors must be taken into
account to insure the measured results are meaningful. Operating System,
Web Server, Database Server, SSL (Secure Socket Layer) are software
examples. RAM, CPU, disk access speeds and HTTP routing are hardware
examples.
