Injecting realistic burstiness to a traditional client-server benchmark

The design of autonomic systems often relies on representative benchmarks for evaluating system performance and scalability. Despite the fact that experimental observations have established that burstiness is a common workload characteristic that has deleterious effects on user-perceived performance, existing client-server benchmarks do not provide mechanisms for injecting burstiness into the workload. In this paper, we introduce a new methodology for generating workloads that emulate the temporal surge phenomenon in a controllable way, thus provide a mechanism that enables testing and evaluation of client-server system performance under reproducible bursty workloads. This new methodology allows to inject different amounts of burstiness into the arrival stream using the index of dispersion, a single parameter that is as simple to use as a turnable knob. We exemplify the effectiveness of this new methodology by introducing a new module into the TPC-W, a benchmark that is routinely u...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICAC
• Authors: Ningfang Mi, Giuliano Casale, Ludmila Cherkasova, Evgenia Smirni
• Keywords: Autonomic Computing, Autonomic Systems, Common Workload Characteristic, ICAC 2009, Reproducible Bursty Workloads