Assessing the impact of reactive workloads on the performance of Web applications

Designing systems with better performance and scalability is a real need to fulfill the user demands and generate profitable Web services. Being able to mimic user behavior and the workload they generate on the servers is fundamental to evaluate the performance of systems and their improvements. One aspect that is usually neglected by workload generators is the user reactivity, that is, how the users react to variable server response time. Further, it is not clear how the reactivity-related changes in the user generated workload affect the server and how these dependences converge. This paper addresses this problem by proposing, implementing, and validating a workload generator that accounts for reactivity while interacting with servers. Our workload generator is used, for instance, to generate workloads based on a TPC-W benchmark. These workloads are used to assess the impacts of reactivity on the performance of a Web application. The results show significant changes in terms of throughput and response time for the experiments, raising the possibility of improving the performance of Web systems considering user reactivity.