TPC-W: a benchmark for e-commerce

When choosing an e-commerce site's hardware and software configuration, we need to know how a specific combination of Web servers, commerce servers, database servers, and supporting hardware will handle a desired load level. Benchmarks let us compare competing alternatives. Researchers have extensively studied workloads on Web sites that provide information and have characterized their performance at the level of HTTP requests. My colleagues and I have also conducted studies to understand e-commerce site workloads and to search for invariants that cut across more than one type of e-commerce site. However, there is currently only one available benchmark for e-commerce sites: TPC benchmark W, designed by the Transaction Processing Performance Council. I explore TPC-W's main features, advantages, and limitations.