SaleSim: A Sale Transaction Simulator for Point-of-Sale Systems

摘要

Point-of-Sale (POS) systems are being popular in the business fields. The enhancement of Internet and wireless network encourages retailers to adopt remote POS servers. For any POS systems (in-house or remote), the server performance must be carefully measured to provide efficient POS operations. However, establishing a universal benchmark index over various POS systems will be a tough challenge due to the different system requirements and their business environments. Therefore, as a performance measurement tool for POS systems, a sale transaction simulator (SaleSim) is designed and implemented. SaleSim measures a POS server's performance by means of checkout-processing time which is the overall processing time of the server for the given sale-transactions. In order to demonstrate the functionality of SaleSim, two different POS servers were selected: a Pentium-4, desktop-class computer and a dual Xeon, server-class computer. The average checkout processing time from those two servers are measured and compared in various simulation configurations.