The rapid growth of eCommerce increasingly means busi- ness revenues depend on providing good quality of service (QoS) for
web site interactions. Traditionally, system administrators have been respon- sible for optimizing tuning parameters, a process
that is time-consuming and skills-intensive, and therefore high cost. This paper describes an ap- proach to automating parameter
tuning using a fuzzy controller that employs rules incorporating qualitative knowledge of the effect of tuning parameters.
An example of such qualitative knowledge in the Apache web server is “MaxClients has a concave upward effect on response times.”
Our studies using a real Apache web server suggest that such a scheme can improve performance without human intervention.
Further, we show that the controller can automatically adapt to changes in workloads.