Analysis of Personal Computer Workloads

Most published research on system behavior and workload characterization has been based on either Unix systems or large, usually IBM, mainframe systems. It is reasonable to believe that user behaviors and workloads are di erent for PC systems. Further, the aspects of system design and most needing study have changed from the mainframes dominant in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Unix systems that became so popular in the 1980s to the PCs that seem to be rapidly taking over many or most aspects of computing. Our analysis focuses instead on Windows95, which is currently the most widely used computer operating system; the newly released Windows98 is very similar. In this paper, we describe our workload analysis based on 36 sets of traces collected from Intel Pentium based PCs running the Microsoft Windows95 operating system. Following the discussion of our Windows95 trace data, we present some descriptive and statistical characterization of this data, directed principally at user behavior and le system behavior.