AbstractInternet 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.