Premium
Web workload generation challenges – an empirical investigation
Author(s) -
Hashemian Raoufehsadat,
Krishnamurthy Diwakar,
Arlitt Martin
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.1093
Subject(s) - workload , computer science , scalability , generator (circuit theory) , java , web application , operating system , web server , throughput , the internet , power (physics) , physics , quantum mechanics , wireless
SUMMARY Workload generators are widely used for testing the performance of Web‐based systems. Typically, these tools are also used to collect measurements such as throughput and end‐user response times that are often used to characterize the QoS provided by a system to its users. However, our study finds that Web workload generation is more difficult than it seems. In examining the popular RUBiS client generator, we found that reported response times could be grossly inaccurate, and that the generated workloads were less realistic than expected, causing server scalability to be incorrectly estimated. Using experimentation, we demonstrate how the Java virtual machine and the Java network library are the root causes of these issues. Our work serves as an example of how to verify the behavior of a Web workload generator. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.