Performance analysis of remote database access

A methodology is proposed for performance benchmarking of remote database access, where applications running on one or more front-end machines access a database on a back-end machine. The resource utilization approach is used as in the multiuser Wisconsin benchmark suite, to characterize application programs. Three kinds of resources are considered: front-end CPU/IO resource (used mostly for data processing), communication bandwidth (for exchanging queries and data between the front ends and the back end), and the back-end CPU/IO resource (used mostly for database access). Application programs are considered as using all three kinds of resources. Throughput and response times are measured for each application program type. The results of running the benchmark on a number of configurations are also presented