HTTP Developer’s Handbook

Transactional Versus Computational Load

When deciding on the optimal configuration for performance, it is important to cater your Web serving environment to a specific application whenever possible. When you must construct an environment suitable for a wide array of Web applications, you are not afforded this luxury, so you have to estimate the most common types of applications your environment will host.

There are two different types of load you need to plan for:

• Transactional load— Load on the network or a server caused by heavy traffic

• Computational load— Load on a server caused by complex computations and/or heavy traffic

Transactional load is the load on a Web serving environment that is primarily the result of the HTTP messages themselves. ...