  Ecommerce is an area where an Autonomic Computing system could be very
effectively deployed. Ecommerce has created demand for high quality information
technology services and businesses are seeking quality of service guarantees
from their service providers. These guarantees are expressed as part of service
level agreements. Properly adjusting tuning parameters for enforcement of the
service level agreement is time-consuming and skills-intensive. Moreover, in
case of changes to the workload, the setting of the parameters may no longer be
optimum. In an ecommerce system, where the workload changes frequently, there
is a need to update the parameters at regular intervals. This paper describes
two approaches, one, using a proportional controller and two, using a fuzzy
controller, to automate the tuning of MaxClients parameter of Apache web server
based on the required response time and the current workload. This is an
illustration of the self-optimizing characteristic of an autonomic computing
system.
