E-commerce Architecture Evaluation Through Stress Test

Of critical importance to the success of any e-commerce site are the two factors: rapid application development and quick response time. A three-tier architecture composed of presentation layer, business layer, and data access layer emerges to allow rapid changes in user interface, business logic, and database structures. Too often, such a logical three-tier architecture is considered as requiring a three-tier physical architecture: Web server, application server, and database server running on separate computers. Contrary to the common belief, a Web stress test reveals that the three-tier logical architecture implemented on a two-tier physical platform guarantees a quicker response time due to the reduction in cross-machine communications. The stress test was conducted in a laboratory environment: the e-commerce traffic was artificially generated from a number of client computers, using scripts. It remains to be seen if the same conclusion could hold in a real environment. If so, the stress test would emerge as a tool to verify the effectiveness of e-commerce architecture, the validity of which is critical to the success of any e-commerce Web site.