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Generating realistic workload for web performance studies

Abstract:

This chapter presents the current state of the art in characterizing and generating workloads for Web performance evaluation. First, it reviews a representative subset of the most relevant perspectives to define Web workloads, and analyzes the main drawbacks that we have to tackle in order to obtain representative workloads for current Web applications. After that, we evaluate and classify the most commonly used software tools proposed in the open literature according to their main features and ability to generate workloads for the dynamic Web. Finally, the chapter presents the Dynamic WEB workload model (DWEB) with the aim of characterizing a more realistic workload when evaluating the performance of current Web applications. DWEB tackles in a progressive way the main challenges when modeling the user's behavior on representative workloads. To this end, it defines a couple of new concepts: user's navigations and user's roles. These concepts characterize different levels of dynamism in the workload definition by means of modeling Web users' behaviors.