Workload characterization: a survey rivisited

Workload characterization is a well established discipline that plays a key role in many performance engineering studies. The large scale social behavior inherent in the applications and services being deployed
nowadays leads to rapid changes in workload intensity and characteristics and opens new challenging management and performance issues. A deep understanding of the user behavior and workload properties and
patterns is therefore compelling. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the state of the art of
workload characterization by addressing its exploitation in some popular application domains. In particular, we focus on conventional Web workloads as well as on the workloads associated with online social
networks, video services, mobile apps and cloud computing infrastructures. We discuss the peculiarities
of these workloads and present the methodological approaches and modeling techniques applied for their
characterization. The role of workload models in various scenarios (e.g., performance evaluation, capacity
planning, content distribution, resource provisioning) is also analyzed.