TCP Behavior of a Busy Internet Server: Analysis and Improvements

The rapid growth of the World Wide Web in recent years has caused a significant shift in the composition of Internet traffic. Although past work has studied the behavior of TCP dynamics in the context of bulk-transfer applications and some studies have begun to investigate the interactions of TCP and HTTP, few have used extensive realworld traffic traces to examine the problem. This interaction is interesting because of the way in which current Web browsers use TCP connections: multiple concurrent short connections from a single host. In this paper, we analyze the way in which Web browsers use TCP connections based on extensive traffic traces obtained from a busy Web server (the official Web server of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games). At the time of operation, this Web server was one of the busiest on the Internet, handling tens of millions of requests per day from several hundred thousand clients. We first describe the techniques used to gather these traces and reconstruct the behavio...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Hari Balakrishnan, Venkata N. Padmanabhan, Srinivasan Seshan, Mark Stemm, Randy H. Katz
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 1998, Loss Recovery, Loss Recovery Performance, TCP Connections