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Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation

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Redesigned SPECweb2005 benchmark
replaces industry-standard SPECweb99

New software provides three real-world workloads;
dynamic content now implemented in PHP and JSP

WARRENTON, Va., June 22, 2005 – The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) has released SPECweb2005, new software for evaluating the performance of web servers. SPECweb2005 replaces SPECweb99 and SPECweb99_SSL, the acknowledged worldwide standards for web server performance evaluation.

SPECweb2005 is a complete departure from its predecessors, with a new client harness, new workloads, and dynamic scripts that reflect current practices of the web development community. It is designed for web server hardware and software vendors who want to test performance, and users seeking performance data for purchasing decisions. SPEC member companies involved in developing SPECweb2005 include AMD, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems.

Three representative workloads

SPECweb2005 emulates users sending browser requests over broadband Internet connections to a web server. It provides three new workloads based on analysis of web server logs and studies of sites from the web browser side:

  • a banking site that transfers encrypted information using HTTPS;
  • an e-commerce site that uses unencrypted HTTP when browsing and secure HTTPS when the user enters the shopping cart; and
  • a vendor support site that provides downloads – such as driver updates and documentation – over HTTP.

“The workloads have been carefully designed to match real-world experience,” says David Morse, chair of the SPECweb2005 project committee. “The inherent ‘think time’ between web page requests is now modeled, as are the effects of browser caching. The number of checks, products and downloads scale up proportionately as the traffic to the web server increases.”

Portability out of the box

SPECweb2005 ships with the dynamic content implemented in PHP and JSP, two web server scripting languages in widespread use today. The benchmark’s test harness is written in Java for clean, portable code.

“The standardized languages in which SPECweb2005 is written will help ensure that little or no compilation is needed, and that the benchmark will work on future platforms,” says Morse.

The benchmark’s metric, also called SPECweb2005, is the mean of results from all three workloads, normalized to a reference platform. Each workload measures the number of simultaneous user sessions a web server can support while still meeting stringent quality-of-service and error-rate requirements.

SPECweb2005 results are not comparable to those of its predecessors, SPECweb99 and SPECweb99_SSL. There will be a three-month transition between the old and new benchmarks during which SPEC will accept, review and publish results from all three. After that period, only SPECweb2005 results will be accepted for publication.

Initial results and pricing

Initial performance results for SPECweb2005 are available on SPEC’s web site at www.spec.org/web2005/results/. SPECweb2005 licensees may publish their own results in accordance with SPEC’s run and reporting rules.

SPECweb2005 is available now on CD-ROM from SPEC for $1,200 for new licensees, $600 for upgrades, and $300 for eligible non-profit organizations.

About SPEC

SPEC (www.spec.org) is a non-profit organization that establishes, maintains and endorses standardized benchmarks to measure the performance of the newest generation of high-performance computers.  Its membership comprises leading computer hardware and software vendors, universities, and research organizations worldwide.  For more information, contact Dianne Rice, SPEC, 6585 Merchant Place, Ste. 100, Warrenton, VA 20187, USA; phone: 540-349-7878; fax: 540-349-5992; e-mail: info@spec.org; web: www.spec.org.

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Press contacts: Bob Cramblitt, Erin Hatfield
                          Cramblitt & Company
                         919-481-4599; info@cramco.com