Acceleration and monitoring of data-center-hosted distributed database-driven web applications

For many e-commerce applications, web pages are created dynamically based on the current state of a business, such as product prices and inventory, stored in database systems. This characteristic requires e-commerce websites to deploy and integrate web servers, application servers, and database systems at the backend. Response time is essential to many e-commerce applications. With increasing availability and advancement of content delivery networks (CDN), many database-driven web applications rely on data centers that host applications and database contents. Such IT infrastructure enables the generation of requested pages at locations much closer to the end-users, thus reducing network latency. However, it incurs additional complexity associated with database-data center synchronization and data freshness. In this paper, the deployment of NEC's CachePortal dynamic content caching technology on a database-driven website in a data center-based distribution infrastructure is described. The new system architecture has been experimentally evaluated and the results show that the deployment of NEC's CachePortal accelerates the dynamic content delivery up to seven times while attaining a high level of content freshness. The way how the performance and behavior of web applications are monitored and analyzed are also dealt with.