A Framework for OSN Performance Evaluation Studies

The ability of the Internet to bring people together connecting them, and the inception of new technologies such as smart mobile devices, has offered new market opportunities like Online Social Networks (OSN). These online applications suppose a series of noticeable challenges both for researchers and developers. The applications and support systems have to deal with a high number of interactive users simultaneously connected; huge amounts of interrelated data are managed and, at the same time, new applications and functionalities appear every few months changing trends, uses, and habits. Consequently, although OSNs are major and growing large-scale Web applications, there is still a lack of workload models and tools for performance evaluation and testability studies. This fact motivates us to develop a general-purpose benchmark for the evaluation of the main hardware and software resources associated to this kind of applications. To this end, we have developed a flexible workload model based on interactive users that, together with a complete and fully operational framework, permits to monitor system resources to perform fine-grain performance and testability studies.