A Study of Communication Delays for Web Transactions

A major bottleneck in using the web for accessing data and executing transactions for e-commerce is the performance. It can take 500–1400 ms to set up the connection and download a web page. Several hundred milliseconds are taken to transmit a multimedia web image. A simple web transaction may have a response time of 2–5 s. The consistency control mechanisms can double this time. A typical electronic trading transaction may take close to 2 min. I assert that the performance is unacceptable and the main cause is the communication system. The communication delays under a variety of scenarios and their causes and remedies are the focus of this study. Mechanisms have been developed for studying the performance of the web transaction processing on the Internet. Experimental studies have been conducted to analyze and understand the behavior of web based transactions and to measure the communication delays. The developed mechanisms have been used to perform a series of experiments around the world. Experiments were conducted to measure the communication delays for different steps which includes web page downloading, access to digital library data and transaction processing. This paper presents the experimental results for a variety of cases. It concludes by suggesting directions for decreasing the communication latency and improving the performance of web transactions.