---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 30 Jun 2004 09:03:39 -0000
From: farooque
Students and developers at Google Inc. have jointly created an open-source
tool designed to better predict the effect on real-world Web site
performance if changes are made to things like network infrastructure.
Called Monkey, the tool first captures data from actual client sessions,
inferring various network and client conditions -- what its creators call
the "monkey see" portion of its work. It then attempts to emulate those
conditions for server tests -- a process called "monkey do."
Monkey is aimed at helping solve a dilemma of Web testing: Trying out
network or server changes on even a small portion of actual user traffic
is risky, but simulations are often unrealistic because they don't
accurately reflect users' network conditions, said Yu-Chung Cheng, a
graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, who worked on
the project during an internship at Google. Cheng presented a paper about
Monkey yesterday at the Usenix Annual Technical Conference. Cheng admitted
that the tool, which is optimized for Google's specific search
application, might not be as accurate at predicting server response for
other types of applications. In response to audience questions, he said
Monkey also doesn't attempt to model how user behavior might change as
server response speeds or slows (for example, more search requests might
come in if server response improves).
"In the end, we believe it is unrealistic to build a generic one-for-all
TCP replay tool," the paper, "Monkey See, Monkey Do: A Tool for TCP
Tracing and Replaying," concludes. "But it is possible to build replay
tool[s] for specific applications."
Source code for the tool is available at
http://ramp.ucsd.edu/projects/monkey/.
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Farooque,
IBM Global Services (India) Pvt Ltd.
First floor, GT Annexe,
Airport Road, Bangalore-17
Tel: 25094107, 25094119
email... farooque@in.ibm.com
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