8.1 Introduction

The scalability of e-business sites is extremely important for the financial success of the business. When an e-business site becomes overloaded, customers become frustrated due. Customers take their business elsewhere and the corporation loses revenue [4]. To analyze the scalability of e-business sites one must characterize its workload at multiple levels, anticipating future user behavior and the increased request levels [3].

This chapter presents a case study of an online auction site. Open multiclass QN models are used to answer what-if questions about the site. The computations used in this chapter are supported by the Chap8-CBMG.XLS, Chap8-OpenQN.XLS, and Chap8-OpenQN-TwoDisks.XLS MS Excel workbooks.