ECM workload

This topic contains a summary of the terms and definitions that are used in the next main topic.

You should also refer to the Part 1 White Paper for a detailed description of the workload used in this case study.

The IBM Rational Performance Tester (RPT) product was used to emulate the virtual users. The think time is the time during which the virtual user was idling for a few seconds before starting the next transaction. Because of the short think times in the RPT scripts that were used, each virtual user generated the load-equivalent of many human end-users who would use ICN to accomplish real work tasks.

The stable workload phase was reached when all virtual users were logged in and were executing their transaction loop. As shown in Figure 1, between the transaction execution was a think time. The metrics transaction throughput and average response time were taken from this stable workload phase.

The more virtual users were logged in parallel during the stable workload phase. The smaller the think time, the higher was the workload level for the SUT.

The z/VM hypervisor had 30 IFL processors in total and for the case study four load levels were defined. Starting from low to medium, medium-to-high and high (shown in Figure 1). These load levels were used throughout the scale-out study.