Improving user-perceived performance at a World Wide Web server

We examine a method to improve the service of incoming requests at a World Wide Web server. The motivating factor is the existence of an impatient user pool: a user aborts a pending Web request if a response is not received within a random timeout period. We use a queueing theory approach to derive an optimal service ordering for this server, assuming Poisson arrivals and exponential service times. We find that the optimal policy is greedy, in that at any time the server processes the request with the highest perceived payoff. We verify these results both analytically and via simulation