Description
The principles on which artificial workload model design is currently based are reviewed, and found wanting for three main reasons: their resource orientation, with the selection of resources often unrelated to the performance impact of resource demands; their avoiding to define an accuracy criterion for the resulting workload model; and their ignoring the dynamics of the workload to be modeled. An approach to establishing conceptual foundations for the design of interactive artificial workloads is described. the approach tries to take the problems found in current design methods into proper account, and to delimit the domains of applicability of these methods. In doing so, it also provides guidance for some of the decisions to be made in workload model design.