Some installations that run our applications can be under hefty stress on a busy day. Our clients ask us is there is a way to manage priorities in our application. For example, in a typical internet banking application, banks are interested in having the form “Transfer money” responsive, while the “Statement” page is a lot less critical. Not being able to transfer money is a direct loss for the bank, while not being able to produce a statement or something similar can be fixed with an apology. AFAIK, neither can you manage different request or session timeouts in a typical web application, it is one value for the whole of your web app.

Managing message priority and expiry time is a typical feature in many middleware platforms. Something like this can be useful for a web front end as well. Do any of web servers (either java or .net) or web frameworks provide these features? How would you go about implementing it if you’d have to go for roll-your-own?