Appeared in the Proceedings of the Computer Measurement Group (CMG) Conference, December 1995, pp. 12631269.
Generating Representative Synthetic Workloads: An Unsolved Problem
Gregory R. Ganger
M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer
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, commonlyused simplifying assumptions about workload charac teristics (e.g., uniformlydistributed 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.