1.2.4 Throughput

Throughput means number of customer requests relative to some unit of time. For example, if a Commerce server can handle 10 customer requests simultaneously and each request takes one second to process, this site can have a potential throughput of 10 requests per second. Let us say that each customer on average submits 60 requests per visit. Then we can also represent throughput by estimating six visits/minute or 360 visits/hour.

Two common units for throughput are page hits/second and scenarios/hour:

However, most of the time we are interested in the first interpretation. That is, each page hit is a Web page from a shopper or user's point of view. So, for example, if the page that a customer requested was redirected to another page then the page hit would still be counted as one page. Similarly, if a JSP aggregates static and dynamic content from many other files the page hit would still be considered for a single page.

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