Characterization of a large web site population with implications for content delivery

This paper presents a systematic study of the properties of a large number of Web sites hosted by a major ISP. To our knowledge, ours is the first comprehensive study of a large server farm that contains thousands of commercial Web sites. We also perform a simulation analysis to estimate potential performance benefits of content delivery networks (CDNs) for these Web sites. We make several interesting observations about the current usage of Web technologies and Web site performance characteristics. First, compared with previous client workload studies, the Web server farm workload contains a much higher degree of uncacheable responses and responses that require mandatory cache validations. A significant reason for this is that cookie use is prevalent among our population, especially among more popular sites. We found an indication of wide-spread indiscriminate usage of cookies, which unnecessarily impedes the use of many content delivery optimizations. We also found that most Web site...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Leeann Bent, Michael Rabinovich, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Zhen Xiao
• Keywords: Commercial Web Sites, Internet Technology, Web Server Farm, Web Sites, WWW 2004