Tivoli

With the Internet's evolution from being a scientific network to a venue where true business can be done, E-commerce is expected to grow into a $1.4 trillion business in 4 years. E-commerce enables the electronic transfer of procurement, order entry, transaction processing, payment, production, inventory, order tracking, customer support, etc. via the internet. An end-to-end e-business transaction typically involves a dozen or more different software layers, including the front end/portal, shopping carts, network communication, credit card or electronic check transaction, security software layers, etc. These layers may be implemented using cgi-script, Java servlets, Java Beans, XML, CORBA, JINI, etc. Thus e-commerce involves the integration of a variety of software, protocols, and standards: GUIs, Java, cgi, perl, TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML are just a few of them.

Understanding and improving the E-business transaction involves investigating the aforementioned layers. With the E-business still evolving, it is extremely difficult to create benchmarks or applications to use for a study on these workloads. The proposed research consists of characterizing , understanding, and optimizing an E-business application. It involves identifying where the cycles are gone during an E-business transaction, and identifying sources of loss of performance. The study will pin point bottlenecks, suggest places to optimize, and caution about coding strategies that are expensive (in terms of performance).