The design and implementation of a WWW traffic generator

With the growing importance of the World Wide Web, Web managers are facing the problem of how to accurately measure the performance of their Web servers. This paper addresses this problem by introducing a traffic generator which is developed by using the Java language. The generator generates Web workload by using an analytic model which models the arrivals at the user level. It is both self-scaling and self-configuring, meaning that it can scale the traffic to any intensities and configure the arrival characteristics to conform to those of any specific Web site. The latter is done by analyzing a site´s access log for adjusting the model parameters being used during traffic generation. In contrast to other traffic generator being used in common Web benchmark software, the real content of the target Web server is used as the testing file set instead of just using a reduced standard file set. Experimental results on using the generator to test two Web servers are also presented. The results show that the generator is both functional and useful to measure the performance of Web servers under real situations