Summary

The same performance issues you encounter every day at brick and mortar stores also prevent your web site from achieving its full performance potential. In this chapter, we defined some basic performance terminology by showing how e-Commerce concepts also apply to the familiar world of traditional retail stores. By now you should understand the fundamental measurement concepts (load, throughput, and response time) of performance. You should also understand the relationships between these measurements, and how they impact each other. Also by now, you should be familiar with some basic optimization terminology ( path length, bottlenecks, and scaling). The upcoming chapters expand and build on these basic performance concepts, so it is important to be comfortable with them before moving ahead.

While a traditional store and an on-line store share similar performance issues, resolving these issues on your web site requires a great deal more planning, testing, and analysis. The upcoming chapters cover in detail the knowledge and skills you need for measuring and tuning Java web sites.