Abstract
With the World Wide Web (WWW) traffic being the fastest growing portion of load on the internet, describing and characterizing this workload is a central issue for any performance evaluation study. In this paper, we present an approach for generating a profile of requests submitted to a WWW server (GET, POST, ...) which takes explicitly into account the user behavior when surfing the WWW (i.e. navigating through it via a WWW browser). We present Probabilistic Attributed Context Free Grammar (PACFG) as a model for translating from this user oriented view of the workload (namely the conversations made within browser windows) to the methods submitted to the Web servers (respectively to a proxy server). The characterization at this lower level are essential for estimating the traffic on the net and are thus the starting point for evaluations of net traffic.
The model is general enough to cover any form of web activity (e.g. different browsers, different protocols, JAVA applets, ...). The model can either be used to generate workloads which try to mimic the usage of a real systems (e.g. using parameters obtained from measurements on the system under study), but could also be parametrized in order to define worst case scenarios, i.e. capturing the system behavior under heavy load. Both approaches are discussed in the paper.
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© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Kotsis, G., Krithivasan, K., Raghavan, S.V. (1998). A Workload Characterization Methodology for WWW Applications. In: Hasegawa, T., Takagi, H., Takahashi, Y. (eds) Performance and Management of Complex Communication Networks. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35360-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35360-9_8
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