Benchmarking a site with realistic workload

Abstract

The rapidly growing number of Web users and the consequent importance of capacity planning have lead to the development of Web benchmarking tools. One common criticism of this approach, is that synthetic workload produced by Web stressing tools is far from realistic. This paper deals with a benchmarking methodology based on workload characterization generated from log files. A customer behavior model graph (CBMG) was proposed by Mensace, et al., (1999) as workload characterization of an e-commerce site. We discuss how CBMG methodology has a wider field of application and how to use this model to efficiently improve a fully integrated Web stressing tool. We also evaluate the differences between our approach and other models based on different characterizations.