A methodology for the evaluation of high response time on E-commerce users and sales

The widespread adoption of high speed Internet access and it’s usage for everyday tasks are causing profound changes in users’ expectations in terms of Web site performance and reliability. At the same time, server management is living a period of changes with the emergence of the cloud computing paradigm that enables scaling server infrastructures within minutes. To help set performance objectives for maximizing user satisfaction and sales, while minimizing the number of servers and their cost, we present a methodology to determine how user sales are affected as response time increases. We begin with the characterization of more than 6 months of Web performance measurements, followed by the study of how the fraction of buyers in the workload is higher at peak traffic times, to then build a model of sales through a learning process using a 5-year sales dataset. Finally, we present our evaluation of high response time on users for popular applications found in the Web.