Database server workload characterization in an e-commerce environment

In an e-commerce system, the database server performance is crucial. A dynamic cache is often used to reduce the load on the database server, which reduces the need for scalability. A good understanding of the workload characteristics of the database server in an e-commerce environment is important to the design, tuning, and capacity planning of the database server. We characterize the database server workloads in a benchmark e-commerce system. We focus on the response time, CPU utilization, the database page reference characteristics, and disk I/Os of the database server. We find that using a dynamic cache can substantially reduce the CPU utilization but not always the number of disk I/Os of the database server. In most cases, using a dynamic cache reduces the temporal locality in database page references, but to a smaller degree than that reported in file servers and Web proxies. Interestingly, in certain e-commerce workloads, using a dynamic cache results in better temporal locality.