Generating representative Web workloads for network and server performance evaluation

  • Authors:

  • Paul Barford;Mark Crovella

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Science Department, Boston University, 111 Cummington St, Boston, MA;Computer Science Department, Boston University, 111 Cummington St, Boston, MA

  • Venue:
  • SIGMETRICS '98/PERFORMANCE '98 Proceedings of the 1998 ACM SIGMETRICS joint international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

One role for workload generation is as a means for understanding how servers and networks respond to variation in load. This enables management and capacity planning based on current and projected usage. This paper applies a number of observations of Web server usage to create a realistic Web workload generation tool which mimics a set of real users accessing a server. The tool, called Surge (Scalable URL Reference Generator) generates references matching empirical measurements of 1) server file size distribution; 2) request size distribution; 3) relative file popularity; 4) embedded file references; 5) temporal locality of reference; and 6) idle periods of individual users. This paper reviews the essential elements required in the generation of a representative Web workload. It also addresses the technical challenges to satisfying this large set of simultaneous constraints on the properties of the reference stream, the solutions we adopted, and their associated accuracy. Finally, we present evidence that Surge exercises servers in a manner significantly different from other Web server benchmarks.