Geist: a generator for e-commerce & internet server traffic

Abstract

This paper describes Geist, a traffic generator for stress testing of web servers. The generator provides a large number of dialable parameters that allow traffic characteristics to range from simple static web-page browsing to the transactional traffic seen by e-commerce front end servers. Unlike other traffic generators, our generator concentrates on the characteristics of the aggregate traffic arriving at the server, which allows for better control of the scaling properties of the traffic and a more scalable generation. In this paper, we describe the traffic characterization and generation process that Geist is based on. We also present the performance of our current implementation, instances of its usage and directions for future work.