An infrastructure for generating and sharing experimental workloads for persistent object systems

Performance evaluation of persistent object system implementations requires the use and evaluation of experimental workloads. Such workloads include a schema describing how the data are related, and application behaviors that capture how the data are manipulated over time, In this paper, we describe an infrastructure for generating and sharing experimental workloads to be used in evaluating the performance of persistent object system implementations. The infrastructure consists of a toolkit that aids the analyst in modeling and instrumenting experimental workloads, and a trace format that allow the analyst to easily reuse and share the workloads, Our infrastructure pro,ides the following benefits: the process of building new experiments for analysis is made easier; experiments to evaluate the performance of implementations can be conducted and reproduced with less effort; and pertinent information can be gathered in a cost-effective manner. We describe the two major components of this infrastructure, the trace format and the toolkit. We also describe our experiences using these components to model, instrument, and experiment with the OO7 benchmark. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.