Scaling for E-Business

9.5. Refining the Approach: Multiple Classes

The real power of performance models becomes evident when they are used for predictive purposes. In capacity planning of e-business, models are essential, because of their ability to adequately predict performance of a particular site under different workloads. E-business sites have a wide variety of customers (e.g., heavy buyers, impulsive buyers, opportunistic buyers, patient buyers, and analytical buyers that perform substantial product research before purchasing something), that exhibit different navigational patterns with different demands on the site resources. The transactions associated with each e-business function are the basic components of the e-business workload. Thus, actual workloads ...