WebStone Architecture

WebStone Architecture - How It Works

The WebStone benchmark can be invoked through a number of different interfaces, depending on the user's needs. This document shows how the provided interfaces fit together.

WebStone GUI

The highest-level interface is delivered through a Web browser. Calling webstone -gui starts a tiny Web server, written in Perl, that executes other Perl programs to cause HTML to be sent to the browser. Care has to be taken to keep the browser from interpreting the Perl scripts before they're sent to the WebStone micro-server. This is why the Perl scripts that make up the WebStone GUI have a special suffix, .wpl.

webstone

This is a script that provides a simple command line interface for running the benchmark. It's provided as a shell script for UNIX systems and as Perl script for Windows NT. webstone has a number of simple options, including setting up the GUI, invoking the GUI, and starting the benchmark directly by calling runbench with or without special arguments.

runbench

runbench, like webstone, is provided as a shell script for UNIX systems and as Perl script for Windows NT. It is a wrapper that provides command line arguments for webmaster by reading a configuration file called conf/testbed. runbench can manage a series of webmaster runs.

webmaster

This program manages the configuration, execution, and data analysis of webclient runs on one or more client computers. webmaster starts runs on all the client systems. It then waits for the webclient to report that they've finished, and polls them for their results. Finally webmaster collates and summarizes the data and prints a report.

webclient

The program that actually creates the test load on the HTTP server to be benchmarked. webclient creates multiple copies of itself. Each copy of the program sends HTTP requests to the server as fast as it can, issuing a new request as soon as its previous request is answered. At the end of the run webclient summarizes its results and either reports them to a webmaster program or writes them to the standard output stream.

WebStone was created by Silicon Graphics, Inc. Version 2.5 and later were developed by Mindcraft, Inc.

runbench(1), webclient(1), webmaster(1), webstone(1), webstonegui(1)