Benchmarking models and tools for distributed Web-server systems

This tutorial reviews benchmarking tools and techniques that can be used to evaluate the performance and scalability of highly accessed Web-server systems. The focus is on design and testing of locally and geographically distributed architectures where the performance evaluation is obtained through workload generators and analyzers in a laboratory environment. The tutorial identifies the qualities and issues of existing tools with respect to the main features that characterize a benchmarking tool (workload representation, load generation, data collection, output analysis and report) and their applicability to the analysis of distributed Web-server systems