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Web server workload characterization: the search for invariants

Authors:

Martin F. Arlitt,

Carey L. WilliamsonAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review, Volume 24, Issue 1

Pages 126 - 137

https://doi.org/10.1145/233008.233034

Published: 15 May 1996 Publication History

Abstract

The phenomenal growth in popularity of the World Wide Web (WWW, or the Web) has made WWW traffic the largest contributor to packet and byte traffic on the NSFNET backbone. This growth has triggered recent research aimed at reducing the volume of network traffic produced by Web clients and servers, by using caching, and reducing the latency for WWW users, by using improved protocols for Web interaction.Fundamental to the goal of improving WWW performance is an understanding of WWW workloads. This paper presents a workload characterization study for Internet Web servers. Six different data sets are used in this study: three from academic (i.e., university) environments, two from scientific research organizations, and one from a commercial Internet provider. These data sets represent three different orders of magnitude in server activity, and two different orders of magnitude in time duration, ranging from one week of activity to one year of activity.Throughout the study, emphasis is placed on finding workload invariants: observations that apply across all the data sets studied. Ten invariants are identified. These invariants are deemed important since they (potentially) represent universal truths for all Internet Web servers. The paper concludes with a discussion of caching and performance issues, using the invariants to suggest performance enhancements that seem most promising for Internet Web servers.

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Web server workload characterization: the search for invariants

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review

ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review Volume 24, Issue 1

May 1996

273 pages

ISSN:0163-5999

DOI:10.1145/233008

Editors:
Blaine E. Gaither
Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO
,
Daniel A. Reed
Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

Issue’s Table of Contents

SIGMETRICS '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
May 1996
279 pages
ISBN:0897917936
DOI:10.1145/233013
Chairman:
Daniel A. Reed
Univ. of Illinois, Urbana
,
Editor:
Blaine D. Gaither
Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO

Copyright © 1996 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 May 1996

Published in SIGMETRICS Volume 24, Issue 1

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