LTF: A Model-Based Load Testing Framework for Web Applications

Performance evaluation is an important approach for various systems to guarantee the quality of their services. However, most performance evaluation tasks face a problem: how to model the system workload? Traditional workload models have limitations when it comes to modeling different workloads. In this paper, we propose a workload model for characterizing and generating synthetic web workloads. First, we introduce a Context-based Sequential Action Model to describe users that exhibit similar access patterns. Next, we present a Workload Parameter Specification Language to describe workload parameters for workload generation. Then, we introduce our load-testing framework based on the proposed model. The representativeness and features of our model are demonstrated by comparing it to other models. Experiments show that our framework can generate accurate and stable synthetic workloads.