Check out the new USENIX Web site.

USENIX Home . About USENIX . Events . membership . Publications . Students
USENIX 2005 Annual Technical Conference, FREENIX Track — Abstract

Pp. 189–198 of the Proceedings

Interactive Performance Measurement with VNCPlay

Nickolai Zeldovich and Ramesh Chandra, Stanford University

Abstract

Today many system benchmarks use throughput as a measure of performance. While throughput is appropriate for benchmarking server environments, response time is a better metric for evaluating desktop performance. Currently, there is a lack of good tools to measure interactive performance; although several commercial GUI testing tools exist, they are not designed for performance measurement.

This paper presents VNCplay, a cross-platform tool for measuring interactive performance of GUI-based systems. VNCplay records a user's interactive session with a system and replays it multiple times under different system configurations; interactive response time is evaluated by comparing the times at which similar screen updates occur in each of the replayed sessions. Using VNCplay we studied the effect of processor speed and disk load on interactive performance of Microsoft Windows and Linux. These experiments show that the same user session can have widely varying interactive response times in different environments while maintaining the same total running time, illustrating that response time is a better measure of interactive performance than throughput. The experimental results make a case for a response time measurement tool like VNCplay.

  • View the full text of this paper in HTML and PDF.
    Click here if you have forgotten your password Until April 2006, you will need your USENIX membership identification in order to access the full papers. The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2005 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.

  • If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.

?Need help? Use our Contacts page.

Last changed: 2 Mar. 2005 aw
Technical Program
USENIX '05 Home
USENIX home