Estimating Effective Web Server Response Time

The dependency on internet and web applications has drastically increased a load over the servers. Therefore monitoring the server health and evaluation of server performance from time to time is very critical in ascertaining the degree of success for any business. In this paper, we are presenting a novel methodology to analyze live production web-logs, in particular, http access logs, in order to evaluate server performance, in terms of effective server response time. This proposed work is particularly suitable for the class of web-based applications running under budget and/or performance constrained environment, where no monitoring data and minimal amount of logging data is available. In this type of particular scenarios, we can still use the proposed approach to ascertain compliance to the service level agreements (SLAs) by estimating effective server response time solely from the http access log. The methodology presented here has been verified using in house experiments as well as using the data received from the live production setup.