Tracing Windows95

摘要

Most published research on system behavior and workload characterization has been based on either Unix systems or large, usually IBM or IBM-compatible, mainframe systems. It is reasonable to believe that user behavior and workloads are different for PC systems. Further, the aspects of system design 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. Windows95, along with its very similar successor, Windows98, is currently the most widely used computer operating system. In this paper, we describe our tracer, which runs on Intel Pentium based PCs running the Microsoft Windows95 operating system. Following the discussion of our tracing methodology, Windows95 operating system, and a tracing tool we developed for Windows95, we give some descriptive and statistical results based on the traces collected from 36 PC users.