Automatic extraction of session-based workload specifications for architecture-level performance models

Workload specifications are required in order to accurately evaluate performance properties of session-based application systems. These properties can be evaluated using measure- ment-based approaches such as load tests and model-based approaches, e.g., based on architecture-level performance models. Workload specifications for both approaches are created separately from each other which may result in dif- ferent workload characteristics. To overcome this challenge, this paper extends our existing WESSBAS approach which defines a domain-specific language (WESSBAS-DSL) enabling the layered modeling and automatic extraction of workload specifications, as well as the transformation into load test scripts. In this paper, we extend WESSBAS by the capability of transforming WESSBAS-DSL instances into workload specifications of architecture-level performance models. The transformation demonstrates that the WESSBAS-DSL can be used as an intermediate language between system-specific workload specifications on the one side and the generation of required inputs for performance evaluation approaches on the other side. The evaluation using the standard industry benchmark SPECjEnterprise2010 shows that workload characteristics of the simulated work- load match the measured workload with high accuracy.