Council Issues Benchmark For Web-Services ApplicationsCouncil Issues Benchmark For Web-Services Applications

A benchmark to measure the performance of Web applications was released Monday by the Transaction Processing Performance Council, the same industry group that developed the TPC relational database benchmarks.

Most database vendors now use the TPC-C benchmark as an indicator of their products' speed and cost to operate over a three-year period. The council hopes that the TPC-App benchmark launched Monday will similarly become a standard for Web-services applications, says Michael Majdalany, administrator for the nonprofit Transaction Processing Performance Council.

Jerry Buggert, director of systems analysis, modeling, and measurement at Unisys Corp., is a user of TPC benchmarks and says TPC-App will replace an earlier attempt at a Web-services benchmark, TPC-W. The latter "was too diffuse of a benchmark," he says.

TPC-App is more focused on the application server, such as IBM's WebSphere, Oracle Application Server, or BEA Systems' WebLogic, rather than on a set of interactions meant to mimic Web services, he says.

Any application server will be benchmarked for its ability to deliver results through a Simple Object Access Protocol Web-services interface, he adds. Many Web services are built using Soap as the standard way to communicate between systems on the Web that know little about each other. In addition, the benchmark may include security services from a commercially available source, Buggert says.

All users of the benchmark will be required to use a messaging system that supplies "durable" message queries, which can be stored in a queue and forwarded when the target system is able to receive them, Buggert adds. The benchmark can be used on both clustered applications and single-server applications.

The 20-member council includes Advanced Micro Devices, BEA Systems, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, Sybase, Sun Microsystems, Teradata, and Unisys.