Amza, CristianaCox, AlanZwaenepoel, Willy2017-08-022017-08-022002-02-19Amza, Cristiana, Cox, Alan and Zwaenepoel, Willy. "Scaling e-Commerce Sites." (2002) https://hdl.handle.net/1911/96295.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/96295We investigate how an e-commerce site can be scaled up from a single machine running a Web server and a database to a cluster of Web server machines and database engine machines. In order to reduce development, maintenance, and installation costs, we avoid modifications to both the Web server and the database engine, and we replicate the database on all database machines. All load balancing and scheduling decisions are implemented in a separate dispatcher. We find that such an architecture scales well for the common e-commerce workload of the TPC-W benchmark, provided that suitable load balancing and scheduling strategies are in place. Key among these strategies is asynchronous scheduling, in which writes complete and are returned to the user as soon as a single instance of the write completes at one of the database engines. The actual choice of load balancing strategy is less important. In particular locality-based load balancing policies, found very profitable for static Web workloads, offer little advantage.14 ppengYou are granted permission for the noncommercial reproduction, distribution, display, and performance of this technical report in any format, but this permission is only for a period of forty-five (45) days from the most recent time that you verified that this technical report is still available from the Computer Science Department of Rice University under terms that include this permission. All other rights are reserved by the author(s).Technical reportTR02-390