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 different for PC systems. Further, the aspects of system design and most-needed study have changed from the mainframes that were 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 Microsoft Windows 95, which is currently the most widely used computer operating system; the newly released Windows 98 is very similar. In this paper, we describe a workload analysis based on 36 sets of traces collected from Intel Pentium-based PCs running the Windows 95 operating system. Following the discussion of our Windows 95 trace data, we present some descriptive and statistical characterizations of this data, directed principally at user behavior and file system behavior.