Journals Proceedings

Abstract

Performance is one of the most important business requirements for web based applications. The suitability of better platform for any web based application depends on various factors attributable to processor architecture, memory, local/ global network, input/output characteristics etc. Performance testing is an important part of any distributed or web application testing plan. Inclusion of performance estimates into planning and development cycles ensures that the application delivered to the user satisfies sustained performance even at high load, availability and scalability requirements. In this paper we have thrown light on performance comparison of web applications on single and multi core servers. The tests have been carried out on single processor single core server and also on dual processor quad core Xeon based server. The performance comparison was carried out based on response time, throughput (No. of hits v/s response time) and connection pooling v/s no connection pooling. It was found that performance of Java applications running on the multi-core servers is far better than those running on single core servers. Web applications on quad-core server give better performance, high availability and scalability. Apache JMeter was used to load test the functional behavior and measure performance based on throughput (No of hits v/s response time) for dynamic querying of data using Java servlets on Tomcat web server. Based on the analysis of performance of web server under varying load of no. of users and threads, it was found that applications on quad core server give more throughput and less response time as compared to single core server. Connection pooling increases the performance of web applications by reusing active database connections instead of creating a new connection with every request. Performance was compared by running the tests using Java servlets for connection pooling and also by acquiring connections directly from the JDBC driver without connection pooling. Based on the test results it was found that in case of quad core server, throughput i.e the number of requests served per second is much higher and reuse of connections from pool of connections showed significant improvement in application performance. This paper describes the results of tests carried out for comparing performance (based on response time) between web applications running on single core server and on quad core server. Tests have also been carried out to analyze advantage of connection pooling over no connection pooling. The test results have been shown graphically.