Accelerating database processing at e-commerce sites

Abstract

Most e-commerce Web sites dynamically generate their contents through a three-tier server architecture composed of a Web server, an application server, and a database server. In such an architecture, the database server easily becomes a bottleneck to the overall performance. In this paper, we propose WDBAccel, a high-performance database server accelerator that significantly improves the throughput of the database processing, and thus that of the overall Web site. WDBAccel eliminates costly, complex query processing needed to obtain query results by reusing previous query results for subsequent queries. This differentiates WDBAccel from other database cache systems, which replicate a database into multiple conventional DBMSs and distribute queries among them. We evaluate the performance of WDBAccel by using the queries of the TPC-W benchmark. The measurement results show that WDBAccel outperforms DBMS-based cache systems by up to an order of magnitude.