Technical Reports
HPL-2009-114
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Injecting Realistic Burstiness to a Traditional Client-Server Benchmark
Mi, Ningfang; Casale, Giuliano; Cherkasova, Ludmila; Smirni, Evgenia
HP Laboratories
HPL-2009-114
Keyword(s): Client-server benchmarks, burstiness, index of dispersion, performance evaluation of self-managed systems.
Abstract: The design of autonomic systems often relies on representative benchmarks for evaluating system performance and scalability. Despite the fact that experimental observations have established that burstiness is a common workload characteristic that has deleterious effects on user-perceived performance, existing client-server benchmarks do not provide mechanisms for injecting burstiness into the workload. In this paper, we introduce a new methodology for generating workloads that emulate the temporal surge phenomenon in a controllable way, thus provide a mechanism that enables testing and evaluation of client-server system performance under reproducible bursty workloads. This new methodology allows to inject different amounts of burstiness into the arrival stream using the index of dispersion, a single parameter that is as simple to use as a turnable knob. We exemplify the effectiveness of this new methodology by introducing a new module into the TPC-W, a benchmark that is routinely used for capacity planning of e-commerce systems. This new module injects burstiness into the arrival process of clients in a controllable manner, and hence, enables understanding system performance degradation due to burstiness. Detailed experimentation on a real system shows that this benchmark modification can stress the system under different degrees of burstiness, making a strong case for the usefulness of this modification for capacity planning of autonomic systems.
10 Pages
Additional Publication Information: To be published in Proc. of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC'2009), Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19, 2009.
External Posting Date: May 21, 2009 [Fulltext]. Approved for External Publication
Internal Posting Date: May 21, 2009 [Fulltext]