"This book takes the mystery out of analyzing Web performance. The authors have skillfully culled through more than a twenty-five years of performance related research, and have selected the results that are most critical to Web performance. They have also developed important new material that deals directly with the special properties of applications that run on the Web. With everything together in a single volume, Menasce and Almeida have created a superb starting point for anyone wishing to explore the world of Web performance".

Jeffrey P. Buzen,
Chief Scientist and CoFounder, BGS Systems

"Many have said that the Web is too amorphous and chaotic to permit meaningful performance forecasts. Menasce and Almeida demolish this myth. Throughput, response time, and congestion can be measured and predicted, all using familiar tools from queueing networks that you can run on your own computer. There is no other book like this. It is a first."

Peter J. Denning
Professor of Computer Science, George Mason University
and former President of the ACM

"This excellent book gives a quantitative and pragmatic approach to measuring, analyzing, and understanding web servers. It presents a good tutorial on the performance issues of web servers, and presents the analytic tools needed to model them. Web servers have bursty and highly-skewed load characteristics. This book presents a new way to model, analyze, and plan for these new performance problems. The book is a valuable resource for students and for web-administrators."

Jim Gray
Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research

"This is a welcome approach to the performance analysis of today's web-based Internet. It is a useful and practical treatment that is eminently accessible to the non-mathematical professional. An impressive feature the authors provide is to deal directly with the fractal nature of web-based traffic; no simple and practical treatment has been offered before, and theirs is a timely contribution."

Leonard Kleinrock
Professor of Computer Science, UCLA