RUBiS Auction Site Prototype

RUBiS is an auction site prototype inspired by eBay.com. It's mainly used to test out application design patterns and see how well application servers can handle lots of users at once.

Core Features of RUBiS

The benchmark for our auction site covers the essential functions: selling, browsing, and bidding on items. We don’t include extra services like instant messaging or forums. There are three types of user sessions: visitors, buyers, and sellers.

User Sessions Explained

If you’re just a visitor, you don’t need to sign up—you can just browse around. But if you want to buy or sell items, you'll need to register first. As a buyer, you get to bid on items and check out your current bids along with ratings and comments from other users.

Sellers have to pay a fee before they can list an item for sale. Once that’s done, the auction kicks off right away and usually lasts about a week. Sellers can also set a reserve price (the minimum amount they’ll accept) for their items.

Open Source Initiative

Good news! RUBiS is free and open source. There are different versions of RUBiS built using three technologies: PHP, Java servlets, and EJB (Enterprise Java Bean).

How It Works Behind the Scenes

In the PHP and Java servlets versions, developers write their own SQL queries. To keep things fair in comparisons, we use the same SQL queries in both setups.

An EJB server helps with various tasks like accessing databases (JDBC), managing transactions (JTA), messaging (JMS), naming (JNDI), and more. It handles multiple EJB containers that manage everything from client sessions to database connections automatically.

User Interaction via Web Browser

You can access RUBiS through any web browser for testing or use our benchmarking tool. We’ve even created a client that mimics user behavior under different workloads while collecting stats.

RUBiS allows 26 different interactions through your web browser. You can browse items by category or region, place bids, buy or sell items, leave comments on other users’ profiles, and check your personal page—kind of like myEbay on eBay!

Browsing & Bidding Mixes

Browsing also includes checking bid histories and seller info. We’ve set up two workload mixes: one focuses on browsing with only read-only actions while the other involves bidding with some write actions mixed in—15% write interactions are typical for an auction site workload.

User Session Simulation

The client emulator creates sessions that simulate real customer interactions by opening persistent HTTP connections to our web server until the session ends.

The emulator waits for a specific time between each interaction based on probabilities defined in a state transition matrix.

Recent Updates in RUBiS

• No longer rely on NFS for log files; now all logs go directly to /tmp!


• Sar logs data is now binary format which makes it easier to analyze short time spans!


• SSH logins are faster thanks to some tweaks made!