Database-Backed Web Applications in the Wild: How Well Do They Work?
This addresses performance bottlenecks for developers of web applications using ORM frameworks, though it is incremental as it builds on existing analysis methods.
The paper tackled performance issues in database-backed web applications using ORM frameworks by developing CADO, a tool that analyzes application logic and database interactions in Ruby on Rails, and applied it to 27 real-world applications, uncovering various sub-optimal performance problems.
Most modern database-backed web applications are built upon Object Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks. While ORM frameworks ease application development by abstracting persistent data as objects, such convenience often comes with a performance cost. In this paper, we present CADO, a tool that analyzes the application logic and its interaction with databases using the Ruby on Rails ORM framework. CADO includes a static program analyzer, a profiler and a synthetic data generator to extract and understand application's performance characteristics. We used CADO to analyze the performance problems of 27 real-world open-source Rails applications, covering domains such as online forums, e-commerce, project management, blogs, etc. Based on the results, we uncovered a number of issues that lead to sub-optimal application performance, ranging from issuing queries, how result sets are used, and physical design. We suggest possible remedies for each issue, and highlight new research opportunities that arise from them.