Examining TPC-C Characteristics on Modern E-Commerce Applications

TPC-C is widely used in evaluating transaction processing systems, due to its versatility and reasonable complexity to test different aspects of the database system. However, due to its age, it’s questionable whether its workload still represents today’s e-commerce applications. We compare the design of TPC-C with that of three popular online shopping applications. We observe a few key differences, including contention levels, use of complicated queries, imbalanced data and traffic, etc. Based on the study, we propose a few changes to TPC-C to better capture the performance characteristics of modern OLTP applications.