Mahnaz Shams
ABSTRACT
Poor performance of Web-based systems can adversely impact the profitability of enterprises that rely on them. As a result, effective performance testing techniques are essential for understanding whether a Web-based system will meet its performance objectives when deployed in the real world. The workload of a Web-based system has to be characterized in terms of sessions; a session being a sequence of inter-dependent requests submitted by a single user. Dependencies arise because some requests depend on the responses of earlier requests in a session. To exercise application functions in a representative manner, these dependencies should be reflected in the synthetic workloads used to test Web-based systems. This makes performance testing a challenge for these systems. In this paper, we propose a model-based approach to address this problem. Our approach uses an application model that captures the dependencies for a Web-based system under study. Essentially, the application model can be used to obtain a large set of valid request sequences representing how users typically interact with the application. This set of sequences can be used to automatically construct a synthetic workload with desired characteristics. The application model provides an indirection which allows a common set of workload generation tools to be used for testing different applications. Consequently, less effort is needed for developing and maintaining the workload generation tools and more effort can be dedicated towards the performance testing process.
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Index Terms
- A model-based approach for testing the performance of web applications
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Reviews
Amos O Olagunju
The workload characterization and performance measurement of Web-based systems (WBS) elicit intriguing inquiries. How should representative sequences of interreliant requests be generated for use in the performance testing of WBS__?__ How should the process for creating synthetic workloads with ideal properties be automated__?__ Despite the available techniques for identifying a Web session [1,2], the shifting statistical characteristics of interrequest dependencies (IRD) make it difficult to construct sensitivity analysis tools for generating representative synthetic workloads. Shams et al. propose an application model (AM) for capturing the application logic implicit in a session-based system. The AM is useful for deriving a large set of user request sequences, and in the automatic generation of synthetic workloads with specific attributes. The AM is predicated on an extended finite state machine that is devoid of the state explosion problem, but capable of modeling applications with higher-order requests and dissimilar types of data dependencies. The proposed approach to the performance testing of Web applications requires the specifications of the workload and application models of a system under investigation for a trace generator that produces a synthetic workload. The authors implemented tools for validating consistencies in application and workload models. They investigated the effects of IRD in performance testing of Web applications. The experimental results reliably revealed the need to preserve the accurate IRD in synthetic workloads of session-based systems. Consequently, the model-based technique is highly recommended for the performance evaluation of Web applications. Online Computing Reviews Service
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