Analysis and evaluation of web application performance enhancement techniques

Abstract

Performance is one of the key factors of web application success. Nowadays, users expect constant availability and immediate response following their actions. To meet those expectations, many new performance enhancement techniques have been created. We have identified almost twenty such techniques with various levels of implementation complexity. Each technique enhances one or more tiers of the application. Our goal was to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of such techniques when applied to finished products (we used three popular open source applications). We argue that it is possible to significantly enhance the performance of web applications by using even a small set of performance enhancement techniques. In this paper we analyse these techniques, describe our approach to testing and measuring their performance and present our results. Finally, we calculate the overall efficiency of each technique using weights given to each of the measured performance indicators, including the technique implementation time.