Rice University Bidding System (RUBiS) benchmark

RUBiS is one of the benchmarks developed as a part of the DynaServer project. The framework is used for evaluating websites that use dynamic content. The framework also provides a client emulator (a workload generation tool), which is the main tool that is of interest to us. The workload generator can be used to simulate many clients that follow a markov model to browse a dynamic web-site. For example, a client generates a request to see the best-sellers, and upon receiving the response, may choose one of the books (links) with certain probability. There's also some "thinking time", between the actions. The tool collects certain statistics (response time, throughput etc.) of interest to us as well.

RubisBenchmark workload summary

• A workload consists of some number of concurrent sessions
• Three types of user sessions: visitor, buyer, seller
• Each sessions is a sequence of interactions, with intervening think times
• Interactions come in 26 different flavors, e.g., ViewItem, SellItemForm, BuyNow
• A Markov transition matrix gives a probabilistic definition of the type of the next interaction in a session, given the type of the current interaction

Workloads analysis and experiments

• There are two workload mixes developed for RUBiS: browsing mix (read-only interactions), and bidding mix (read, 15% read-write interactions). As we run these mixes, we can get an idea of number of interactions, and then vary the probabilities, and thinking times.
• Things that we want to vary for our experiments
  • Number of transactions per minute that are done at the DB server
  • Number of total interactions as seen by the client, note that we can have different number of transactions/min at the DB side depending on the think time.
  • I am not sure whether this can be done, but it would be nice we can vary the number of interactions/min at the web serer and the DB.
• Things to be measured
  • CPU utilization of web, and DB servers.
  • Throughput
  • Response times
  • Memory usage, Disk usage (for future ?)

External Resources

• Main Rubis web page, including software downloads
• WWW-5 overview paper