A performance and installation research in web server solutions for small e-commerce systems.

Sammanfattning: This thesis investigates two different web server solutions. One is a commercial, proprietary solution known as the Windows solution that consists of Windows Server 2003, IIS and ASP. The other is a free, open source solution consisting of FreeBSD, Apache and PHP. The both solutions had the database MySQL as a common component. The hypothesis that was used in this investigation is as follows: IIS on Windows Server is not better than Apache on FreeBSD for e-commerce systems. To answer the hypothesis two empirical comparisons were conducted. One was a response time experiment testing two symmetrical web shops developed for the both solutions. For this response time test a stress test application was developed. The second comparison was a case study in the ease of installation of the two different solutions. The third empirical research method was a survey that was conducted among Swedish web hotel administrators. The survey identifies various factors that play a part when choosing one of the solutions. Open source users prefer performance, security and costs of software while Windows users prefer required knowledge, usability and compatibility. By analysing our result it is shown that the hypothesis is verified proving that an open source solution reports better performance because it has lower response times than the Windows solution. The results from the case study show that Windows is the easiest solution to install.