TPC-W: Benchmarking An Ecommerce Solution
Wayne D. Smith · 2001
How does one determine server performance and price/performance for an Internet commerce, Ecommerce, environment? The most notable benchmarks, (SPECWeb and TPC-C), have been referenced by many vendors promoting the performance of their Ecommerce servers. However these benchmarks do not come close to representing the complex environment of an Ecommerce workload. In Feb 2000, the Transaction Performance Council, TPC, introduced the TPC-W benchmark targeted at the Ecommerce environment. TPC-W specifies an Ecommerce workload that simulates customers browsing and buying products from a website. The solution for this workload is a number of servers, (Web Servers, Web Caches, Image Servers & Database Server), working in concert to provide an Ecommerce solution. It is very similar to how an actual Ecommerce site would operate. On first glance at a TPC-W publication, there is the immediate reaction to ask what is it benchmarking? Whereas previous benchmarks target one specific server, TPC-W benchmark results contain a host of servers performing different functions. However, unlike other TPC benchmarks, TPC-W requires the test sponsor to report performance data for the various servers involved. Thus by peeling back the covers of TPC-W, one can obtain information of how each of the servers perform in a complex Ecommerce environment. TPC-W’s strength is that one can determine the performance characteristics of specific Ecommerce servers in a simulated Ecommerce workload.