Abstract
Generating Representative Synthetic Workloads: An Unsolved Problem
Proceedings of the Computer Measurement Group (CMG) Conference, December 1995, pp. 1263-1269.
Gregory R. Ganger
Synthetic disk request traces are convenient and popular workloads for performance evaluation of storage subsystem designs and implementations. This paper develops an approach for validating synthetic disk request generators. Using this approach, commonly-used simplifying assumptions about workload charac teristics (e.g., uniformly-distributed starting addresses and Poisson arrivals) are shown to be inappropriate, often leading to inaccurate performance predictions. Also, workload characteristics that require additional study are identified.
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