The App Tier Is Tapped Out Again?!

As the static Web rapidly evolves into a fully interactive Internet, the data center performance burden shifts from the Web tier to the application tier. This shift puts new demands and challenges on server administrators — if properly addressed, they can add millions to the bottom line. The new midtier applications have voracious appetites for server resources but can be tamed with a little understanding, forethought, and planning. The key is in matching the compute capacity — the right horsepower, memory footprint, and bandwidth between tiers — to the forecasted workload and applying the right dash of caching and application tuning. This document provides a high-level overview of this tier, its behavior, and how to deal with its unique demands when the load gets heavy.