Generating Representative Web Workloads for Network and Server Performance Evaluation

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 le size distribution 2) request size distribution 3) relative le popularity 4) embedded le 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 evi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Paul Barford, Mark Crovella
• Keywords: Hardware, SIGMETRICS 1998, Web Workload, Web Workload Generation, Workload Generation