Performance evaluation of a web based system : case study - lamp based learnorg moodle

Abstract

Web based applications are widely deployed around the world for everyday activities of an average person ranging from simple entertainment to complex social, economic, political, educational and scientific tasks. LAMP that abbreviates the combination of Linux, Apache, My SQL and PHP is a popular set of technologies on which most of the web applications are deployed. Although LAMP based web applications arc deployed in millions, the question is whether the intended purposes of these applications are fulfilled satisfactorily from the end user's point of view. The response time and the server resource utilization are the most noteworthy yardsticks using which performance is quantified This study proposes a proper performance evaluation procedure and recommends an appropriate set of tools and techniques that can be used for the same. The typical method of evaluating performance is to monitor only the server side resource utilization. Many popular tools report the server resource utilization as average values over a period of few minutes whereas most of the user interactions span only for a few seconds. These average values may indicate that the servers are functioning smoothly, while the users may be suffering from poor response from the server. In contrast, this study proposes that while the response time at the user's end is being monitored, the server resources must also be tracked and analyzed. The case study of LeamOrg- Moodle is used to exemplify the proposed procedure and how the same can be extended. The popular Belief of network always being the bottleneck was not supported by the empirical results of the study. The results obtained for the •'system under study revealed that the memory can also be a resource bottleneck.