Web Capacity Planning
Project Information

   Student Project Abstracts On-Line

• Performance Study and Capacity Planning of a Web Server
• An Analytical model of www.uark.edu
• Performance Analysis of the Apache Web Server
• WebTron Performance Evaluation

   Project Milestones

The capacity planning project is worth 100 points. There are several milestones that you must meet to get full credit on the project. The milestones and points allocated are as follows:

1. Thursday, July 1
   • Partnership and system selection due. Turn in a statement of the partnership you have formed along with a description of the system you have selected for your capacity planning study. The system description should be approximately one typed page and should contain a preliminary description of some of the items required for the specification document (see next item). This report is worth 5/100 points.

2. Monday, July 12
   • Project specification document due. The project specification document should describe the steps that you intend to perform for your project and, specifically, how you plan to do them. This document does not contain your final results. It is possible that these plans may change through the course of the project, but you should be as accurate as possible at this point. This report will be worth 30/100 points. Items that you need to describe in the specification document include:
     1. project goals
     2. system specification (i.e., understanding the environment)
     3. measurement methodology (i.e., what tools will you use, how do you plan to use them)
     4. workload characterization methodology (i.e., how will you classify the data, what criteria are important, what are the critical applications in your workload, from what perspective will you be performing the study)
     5. model construction methodology (i.e., will you construct an operational analysis model, system model, component model)
     6. prediction methodology (i.e., what changes are you predicting, what techniques do you plan to use for workload forecasting)
     7. validation procedures
     8. cost modeling methodology, if any
   • Create an HTML description of your project. Send me the html file via email so that I can include it with a list of all project descriptions. You may use a format similar to that found in the sample projects page. The HTML description is worth 5/100 points.

3. Monday, July 26
   • Presentations. The presentation is worth 30/100 points. Presentations should be high quality, and are expected to last 20 to 30 minutes. The presentation will describe the goals and steps of your project, and will also contain your results and recommendations. About half of the presentation grade will be based on the quality of your results, and about half of the presentation grade will be based on your ability to communicate your results. You should use any feedback that you receive on your presentation to modify your work and include it in your final report.

4. Thursday, July 29
   • Final report due. The final report is worth 30/100 points. The final report should reiterate the items from the specification document, along with any changes that you made along the way. In addition, the final report should contain your results and recommendations, including graphs and charts, and a copy of any presentation material that you used.