Can I run SPECweb or other benchmarks through ZXTM?

Yes. However, it's not as simple(!) as just setting up SPECweb and letting it run. SPECweb99 is not suited for clustering, so you may not get the results you hope for.

SPECweb has two main parts; static and dynamic content. The static files delivered by the web servers can easily be load-balanced across several back-ends, and ZXTM could be used to distribute the load. However, the dynamic content is troublesome - there are requests that must read and store state on the back-ends, so this state must be accessibile by all the back-ends. A simple solution to this would be to NFS-export the document root of the test across the machines. However, this would severely affect performance and reduce the benefit of using ZXTM in the first place.

To date, no SPECweb99 submissions have made use of any traffic manager or load balancer from any hardware or software vendor.

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 01 July 2005