CARENA: a tool to capture and replay Web navigation sessions

Abstract

Web user behavior has widely changed over the last years. To perform precise and up-to-date Web user behavior characterization is important to carry out representative Web performance studies. In this sense, it is valuable to capture detailed information about the user's experience, which permits to perform a fine grain characterization. Two main types of tools are distinguishable: complex commercial software tools like workload generators and academic tools. The latter mainly concentrate on the development of windows applications which gather Web events (e.g., browser events) or tools modifying a part of the web browser rode. In this paper, we present CARENA, a client-side browser-embedded tool to capture and replay user navigation sessions. Like some commercial software packages our tool captures information about the user session, which can be used later to replay or mimic the gathered user navigation. Nevertheless, unlike these software packages, our tool emulates the original user think times since these times are important to obtain precise and reliable performance results. Among the main features of CARENA are: multiplatform, open source, lightweight, standards based, easily installable and usable, programmed in JavaScript and XUL.