Characterization of the E-commerce Storage Subsystem Workload

This paper characterizes the workload seen at the storage subsystem of an e-commerce system. Measurements are conducted on multi-tiered systems running three different benchmarks, i.e., TPC-W, TPC-C, and RUBiS. In this environment, TPC-W and RUBiS are used to represent web-based e-commerce applications (i.e., on-line shopping and auctioning). They generate mostly READ-dominated workloads. The TPC-C benchmark, although not directly an e-commerce benchmark, is used to represent an e-commerce system under heavy on-line transactions processing activity. Different from the TPC-W and RUBiS benchmarks, TPC-C generates WRITE-dominated workloads.For all three benchmarks, in addition to the system load, the workload mix causes the system resources such as memory to saturate,IO traffic to increase, and, consequently, overall system throughput to reduce.Generally, when a workload shifts from web-site browsing (i.e, reading) to transaction processing (i.e writing) the IO load reduces but the footprint of the IO working set increases, which slows down the IO subsystem.File system and device driver scheduling represent elements in the IO path that for a given set of system resources further improve user-level throughput. Their impact is visible for medium to high utilization and diminishes for light load or overload.