  Critical to evaluating the capacity, scalability, and availability of web
systems are realistic web traffic generators. Web traffic generation is a
classic research problem, no generator accounts for the characteristics of web
robots or crawlers that are now the dominant source of traffic to a web server.
Administrators are thus unable to test, stress, and evaluate how their systems
perform in the face of ever increasing levels of web robot traffic. To resolve
this problem, this paper introduces a novel approach to generate synthetic web
robot traffic with high fidelity. It generates traffic that accounts for both
the temporal and behavioral qualities of robot traffic by statistical and
Bayesian models that are fitted to the properties of robot traffic seen in web
logs from North America and Europe. We evaluate our traffic generator by
comparing the characteristics of generated traffic to those of the original
data. We look at session arrival rates, inter-arrival times and session
lengths, comparing and contrasting them between generated and real traffic.
Finally, we show that our generated traffic affects cache performance similarly
to actual traffic, using the common LRU and LFU eviction policies.
