Workshop on Performance and Architecture of Web Servers (PAWS-2000) 1 Motivation After having grown briskly in the last several years, Internet services have not only entered the mainstream of society but also moved into areas where a plain best-effort service model is no longer adequate. This phenomenon is well illustrated by two major thrust areas: Electronic commerce where poor performance or unavailability could be very expensive, and streaming media services (including voice over IP) where quality of service is a fundamental requirement. These areas have brought to light a host of performance, availability and architectural issues that must be resolved effectively in order to prevent widespread customer dissatisfaction that could adversely affect the long-term growth of online services. In particular, the unresponsiveness and apparent failures of e-commerce servers, and consequent loss in revenue for e-commerce industry is well noted. Similarly, the difficulties in providing adequate quality of service have stunted the proliferation of streaming media services on the Internet. The advances needed for handling these issues fall into the following four areas: better architectural support (both hardware and software), better workload characterization and development of robust capacity engineering methods, application level overload control, and ensuring quality of service.
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