Workflow management systems (WFMS) are a cornerstone of
mission-criticial, possibly cross-organizational
business processes. For largescale applications both
their performance and availability are crucial factors,
and the system needs to be properly configured to meet
the application demands. Despite ample work on scalable
system architectures for workflow management, the
literature has neglected the important issues of how to
systematically measure the performance of a given system
configuration and how to determine viable configurations
without resorting to expensive trial-anderror or
guesswork. This paper proposes a synthetic benchmark for
workflow management systems; based on the TPC-C
order-entry benchmark, a complete e-commerce workflow is
specified in a system-independent form. pdf