The increasing popularity of web applications has introduced a new paradigm where users are no longer passive web consumers but they become active contributors to the Web, specially in the contexts of social networking, blogs, wikis or e-commerce. In this new paradigm, contents and services are even more dynamic, which consequently increases the level of dynamism in user's behavior. Moreover, this trend is expected to rise in the incoming Web.This dynamism is a major adversity to define and model representative web workload, in fact, this characteristic is not fully represented in the most of the current web workload generators. This work proves that the web user's dynamic behavior is a crucial point that must be addressed in web performance studies in order to accurately estimate system performance indexes.In this paper, we analyze the effect of using a more realistic dynamic workload on the web performance metrics. To this end, we evaluate a typical e-commerce scenario and compare the results obtained using different levels of dynamic workload instead of traditional workloads. Experimental results show that, when a more dynamic and interactive workload is taken into account, performance indexes can widely differ and noticeably affect the stress borderline on the server. For instance, the processor usage can increase 30% due to dynamism, affecting negatively average response time perceived by users, which can also turn in unwanted effects in marketing and fidelity policies.

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Understanding the characteristics of the users' workload is an important aspect when designing and providing web services. The majority of current workload characterization techniques introduce some limitations when representing the dynamism of the client behavior and the continuous changes in its role. This fact implies that the majority of the existing workload generators model these characteristics in a simple an improperly way. This paper focuses on the dynamism of WWW in general, and the new techniques to characterize the user behavior. Our work is addressed to develop a dynamic workload generator that considers the new behavior of the web clients, and the continuous changes in their role.

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The second World Wide Web generation is increasingly oriented to services. This generation is rich in requests for dynamic and personalised content, which represents an important segment of current internet traffic. E-business applications are a particular case of the dynamic web, where dynamism and personalisation play an important role in business strategy. Understanding the characteristics of the users' workloads is very important when designing and providing web services. In e-business the importance is even greater, because this analysis is used to extract the knowledge needed to take business decisions. Workload characterisation techniques introduce some drawbacks when representing the dynamism of client behaviour. This drawback implies that most of the current workload generators model this characteristic in a simple and inaccurate way. This paper focuses on the dynamism of e-business applications and the new techniques to characterise user workloads. Our work is addressed to building a dynamic workload generator that considers the new behaviour of web clients.