Analyzing factors that influence end-to-end Web performance

Abstract Web performance impacts the popularity of a particular Web site or service as well as the load on the network, but there have been no publicly available end-to-end measurements that have focused on a large number of popular Web servers examining the components of delay or the effectiveness of the recent changes to the HTTP protocol. In this paper we report on an extensive study carried out from many client sites geographically distributed around the world to a collection of over 700 servers to which a majority of Web traffic is directed. Our results show that the HTTP/1.1 protocol, particularly with pipelining, is indeed an improvement over existing practice, but that servers serving a small number of objects or closing a persistent connection without explicit notification can reduce or eliminate any performance improvement. Similarly, use of caching and multi-server content distribution can also improve performance if done effectively.

[1]  Paul Barford,et al.  A performance evaluation of hyper text transfer protocols , 1999, SIGMETRICS '99.

[2]  Paul Barford,et al.  Measuring Web performance in the wide area , 1999, PERV.

[3]  Balachander Krishnamurthy,et al.  Piggyback Server Invalidation for Proxy Cache Coherency , 1998, Comput. Networks.

[4]  Mark Allman,et al.  Network and User-Perceived Performance of Web Page Retrievals , 1998 .

[5]  Craig E. Wills,et al.  Studying the impact of more complete server information on Web caching , 2001, Comput. Commun..

[6]  Sandy Irani,et al.  Cost-Aware WWW Proxy Caching Algorithms , 1997, USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems.

[7]  Vern Paxson,et al.  End-to-end Internet packet dynamics , 1997, SIGCOMM '97.

[8]  Robert W. Brodersen,et al.  Globally progressive interactive web delivery , 1999, IEEE INFOCOM '99. Conference on Computer Communications. Proceedings. Eighteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. The Future is Now (Cat. No.99CH36320).

[9]  Craig E. Wills,et al.  Towards a Better Understanding of Web Resources and Server Responses for Improved Caching , 1999, Comput. Networks.

[10]  James Gettys,et al.  Network performance effects of HTTP/1.1, CSS1, and PNG , 1997, SIGCOMM '97.

[11]  David Mosberger,et al.  httperf—a tool for measuring web server performance , 1998, PERV.

[12]  Jeffrey C. Mogul,et al.  The case for persistent-connection HTTP , 1995, SIGCOMM '95.

[13]  Balachander Krishnamurthy,et al.  Key Differences Between HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 , 1999, Comput. Networks.

[14]  Balachander Krishnamurthy,et al.  PRO-COW: Protocol Compliance on the Web , 1999 .