An experimental case study on the relationship between workload and resource consumption in a commercial web server

Since software aging has been proposed for decades, resource consumption parameters and performance parameters have been used to identify whether running a commercial web server has been in aging state or failure state. However, the relationship between workload parameters and resource consumption parameters has not been analyzed and also sensitivity between resource consumption parameters and workload parameters has not been studied before. In this work, we give an experimental case study about resource consumption parameters and workload parameters in an Internet Information Services. Firstly, we use fitted resource consumption parameter to learn the relationship between workload parameters and resource consumption parameters through visual observation and calculation. Secondly, sensitivity analysis is used to find how resource consumption parameter changes when deleting one workload parameter at a time. Thirdly, the regression tree based on a risk estimate is used to forecast resource consumption. In the experiments, we see that almost all the parameters present nonlinear feature through visual observation. And we find that some workload parameters are redundant for fitting resource parameters by using sensitivity analysis. Our proposed regression tree is better than artificial neural network by using mean absolute error.