WikiBench is a Web hosting benchmark: it allows one to stress-test systems designed to host Web applications (application servers, load balancers, databases, Cloud computing platforms, etc.). Web hosting benchmarks are used to conduct research in many areas such as database query caching, capacity planning, virtualization, data storage, data center management, etc.
Unlike traditional Web hosting benchmarks which define a “toy” application and exercise it with synthetic workloads, WikiBench takes a very unique different approach: it is realistic because it is real. This means:
- It uses a real major Web application: MediaWiki, the application used to host wikipedia.org.
- It manipulates real data: actual database dumps of the wikipedia website.
- It generates real traffic by replaying traces of traffic actually addressed to Wikipedia.