BenchLab: An Open Testbed for Realistic Benchmarking of Web Applications

Web applications have evolved from serving static content to dynamically generating Web pages. Web 2.0 applications include JavaScript and AJAX technologies that manage increasingly complex interactions between the client and the Web server. Traditional benchmarks rely on browser emulators that mimic the basic network functionality of real Web browsers but cannot emulate the more complex interactions. Moreover, experiments are typically conducted on LANs, which fail to capture real latencies perceived by users geographically distributed on the Internet. To address these issues, we propose BenchLab, an open testbed that uses real Web browsers to measure the performance of Web applications. We show why using real browsers is important for benchmarking modern Web applications such as Wikibooks and demonstrate geographically distributed load injection for modern Web applications.