Performance evaluation of a hybrid run-time management policy for data intensive Web sites

The issues of performance, response efficiency and data consistency are among the most important for data intensive Web sites. In order to deal with these issues we analyze and evaluate a hybrid run-time management policy that may be applied to data intensive Web sites. Our research relies on the performance evaluation of experimental client/server configurations. We propose a hybrid Web site run-time management policy that may apply to different Web site request patterns and data update frequencies. A run-time management policy is viewed as a Web page materialization policy that can adapt to different conditions at run-time. We define a concept that we have named the Compromise Factor (CF), to achieve the relationship between current server conditions and the materialization policy. The issue of Web and database data consistency is the driving force behind our approach. In some cases though, we prove that certain compromises to consistency can be beneficial to Web server performance and at the same time be unnoticeable to users. We first present a general a comparative cost model for the hybrid management policy and three other related and popular Web management policies. We then evaluate the performance of all the approaches. The results of our evaluation show that the concept of the CF may be beneficial to Web servers in terms of performance.