The problem of performance and scalability of web applications is challenged by most of the software companies. It is difficult to maintain the performance of a web application while the number of users is continuously increasing. The common solution for this problem is scalability. A web application can handle incoming and outgoing requests using blocking or non-blocking Input/Output operation. The way that a single server handles requests affects its ability to scale and depends on a web framework that was used to build the web application. It is especially important for Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA) based applications which consist of distributed Representational State Transfer (REST) web services. This research was inspired by a real problem stated by a software company that was considering the migration to the non-blocking web framework but did not know the possible profits. The objective of the research was to evaluate the influence of web framework's type on the performance of ROA based applications and to provide guidelines for assessing profits of migration from blocking to non-blocking JVM web frameworks. First, internet ranking was used to obtain the list of the most popular web frameworks. Then, the web frameworks were used to conduct two experiments that investigated the influence of web framework's type on the performance of ROA based applications. Next, the consultations with software architects were arranged in order to find a method for approximating the performance of overall application. Finally, the guidelines were prepared based on the consultations and the results of the experiments. Three blocking and non-blocking highly ranked and JVM based web frameworks were selected. The first experiment showed that the non-blocking web frameworks can provide performance up to 2.5 times higher than blocking web frameworks in ROA based applications. The experiment performed on existing application showed average 27\% performance improvement after the migration. The elaborated guidelines successfully convinced the company that provided the application for testing to conduct the migration on the production environment. The experiment results proved that the migration from blocking to non-blocking web frameworks increases the performance of web application. The prepared guidelines can help software architects to decide if it is worth to migrate. However the guidelines are context depended and further investigation is needed to make it more general.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:bth-5932 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Bilski, Mateusz |
| Publisher | Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Institutionen för datalogi och datorsystemteknik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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