CONCURRENCY AND COMPUTATION: PRACTICE AND EXPERIENCE Concurrency Computat.: Pract. Exper. 2010; 22:68–106 Published online 19 August 2009 inWiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/cpe.1470 A survey on performance management for internet applications Jordi Guitart 1,2, *, † , Jordi Torres 1,2 and Eduard Ayguad´ e 1,2 1 Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Barcelona, Spain 2 Computer Architecture Department, Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain SUMMARY Internet applications have become indispensable for many business and personal processes, turning the performance of these applications into a key issue. For this reason, recent research has comprehensively explored mechanisms for managing the performance of these applications, with special focus on dealing with overload situations and providing QoS guarantees to clients. This paper makes a survey on the different proposals in the literature for managing Internet applications’ performance. We present a complete taxonomy that characterizes and classifies these proposals into several categories including request scheduling, admission control, service differentiation, dynamic resource management, service degradation, control theoretic approaches, works using queuing models, observation-based approaches that use runtime measurements, and overall approaches combining several mechanisms. For each work, we provide a brief description in order to provide the reader with a global understanding of the research progress in this area. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 27 November 2008; Revised 30 April 2009; Accepted 7 June 2009 KEY WORDS: internet applications; performance management; QoS guarantees; overload control * Correspondence to: Jordi Guitart, Jordi Girona 1-3, Campus Nord UPC, M` odul C6, E-08034 Barcelona, Spain. † E-mail: jguitart@ac.upc.edu Contract/grant sponsor: Ministry of Science and Technology of Spain and the European Union (FEDER funds); contract/grant number: TIN2007-60625 Contract/grant sponsor: BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) Copyright 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.