Irish companies are in a headlong rush to embrace e-commerce, establishing new websites, displaying goods and services for selection and transacting this new form of business. But what happens when things don't work as smoothly as they always do in the sales literature? How is the company to know whether its new site will be a hit or a hindrance?

A research group at Dublin City University has been established to consider these e-commerce-performance issues with an initial budget of £950,000 (€1.25 million). "We are not web designers," explained Dr John Murphy who lectures in electronic engineering at DCU. "We are really doing Web-performance assurance."

The university received £22 million last year under the Higher Education Authority's £180 million research funding programme supported by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and £8.5 million of this is devoted to RINCE, the Research Institute for Network and Communications Engineering. Much of this will be given over to capital investment including a new building, but the funding of concern to Dr Murphy will be used to establish the Performance Engineering Laboratory within RINCE.

About half of the lab's cash will be spent building a 200-square-metre facility within the new building and half will be used to hire a team and conduct research, Dr Murphy said. The lab will be largely about website performance, he said.

DCU's interest is driven by the strength of the Internet and e-commerce which is growing at a remarkable rate. The global Internet economy is forecast to reach $2.8 trillion (€2.83 trillion) by 2003, becoming the world's third largest economy and ahead of the GDP of Germany, France or Britain. Predicted annual growth rates are more than 80 per cent over that period.

Small and large companies will benefit from having a stall on the Web, given an estimated current Internet customer base of 165 million people worldwide. Dell reportedly earns $14 million per day over the net and Cisco earns about $20 million per day. Participation in e-commerce and its growing importance to company financial health means, however, that involvement must be done correctly or the opportunities could be lost.

Performance issues - for example how long it takes to open a site or tour its pages, enter data or participate in what the site has to offer - began to become a problem during the mid-1980s, Dr Murphy said, and adjustments were made to improve net surfing performance. Things have moved on and now the concerns are down to getting people to spend money, where performance again becomes a critical ingredient for success.

"As the systems grow, performance problems begin to appear," he said. So many sites are established on a DIY basis using COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) products and are done in-house without a real grasp of the computer or communications demands to support a site.

"Nobody would build a phone system without looking at performance," Dr Murphy said. The operator needs to know "if it can sustain the load and where the bottlenecks will be".

Deadlines such as closing times or the end of an offer can cause severe pressures on a website.

"Can your system survive that and if it doesn't survive what impression is going to be left with your customers?"

The lab, which will employ three academics and up to 20 researchers, is building software tools that can be used to assess how a system will perform and how its associated communications will work under stress.

"The whole point of this test is to break the system. If it hasn't been broken then it hasn't been properly tested," Dr Murphy said. The test systems will use computer modelling and will not simply check one component after another.

"If you test them blindly you only find them one after another," he explained. This was like looking for leaks in an airbed, finding them and repairing them one at a time.

Once set up, the system model can be checked with a series of "what ifs", Dr Murphy said. "What if the load was 10 times higher? What if the load was 10 times smaller than expected? All of the if questions can be answered with modelling even before the system is built," he said.

Modelling data could be assessed and then this information could be applied as the website was being built. Other software tools could then be applied to pressure the system after it was assembled, long before the e-customer logged on.

The idea would be to find the problem before the customer did and before he could get sufficiently annoyed to leave the site.

Site security is not part of the lab's initial work plan. It will look specifically at site performance, and the first software products are expected to become available later this year, Dr Murphy said. A complete test bed for websites should be complete within a few years.