Fine grain performance evaluation of e-commerce sites

E-commerce sites are still a reference for the Web technology in terms of complexity and performance requirements, including availability and scalability. In this paper we show that a coarse grain analysis, that is used in most performance studies, may lead to incomplete or false deductions about the behavior of the hardware and software components supporting e-commerce sites. Through a fine grain performance evaluation of a medium size e-commerce site, we find some interesting results that demonstrate the importance of an analysis approach that is carried out at the software function level with the combination of distribution oriented metrics instead of average values.