Impact of resource locking on performance of web-based applications

This paper develops a model and an algorithm to evaluate the effects of resource locking on the performance of internet applications. Resource locking is the phenomenon in which, after a request is sent, a front-end server is kept busy until the request's processing is completed at a secondary external server. This is related to, but different from, blocking in queueing networks and has significant capacity implications. The algorithm developed enables evaluation of a simplified Markov model for the system. The model is evaluated by benchmarking against simulation. The results can be used to aid performance evaluation, capacity planning and management.