Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Performance Characteristics of the World Wide Web

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Performance Evaluation: Origins and Directions

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1769))

Abstract

The Web is a distributed client-server system on a scale greater than any other. Its large scale and increasingly important role in society make it an important object of study and evaluation. In recent years a large literature on the performance of the Web has developed. At the time of writing (1999) there are workshops, conferences, journals, and books whose focus is on of performance evaluation of the Web—encompassing protocols, servers and clients [1,2,3,4,5,28].

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. The International World Wide Web conference. Annual, 1992-.

    Google Scholar 

  2. International WWW caching workshop. Yearly, 1996-.

    Google Scholar 

  3. USENIX symposium on internet technologies and systems. Biennial, 1997,1999-.

    Google Scholar 

  4. ACM/SIGMETRICS workshop on internet server performance (WISP). Annual, 1998-.

    Google Scholar 

  5. World Wide Web. Published by Baltzer Science Publishers, The Netherlands (ISSN 1386-145X), 1998-.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Virgílio Almeida, Azer Bestavros, Mark Crovella, and Adriana de Oliveira. Characterizing reference locality in the WWW. In Proceedings of 1996 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Information Systems (PDIS’ 96), pages 92–103, December 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  7. M. Arlitt, R. Friedrich, and T. Jin. Performance evaluation of Web proxy cache replacement policies. Proceedings of Performance Tools’ 98. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1469:193–206, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Martin F. Arlitt and Carey L. Williamson. Internet web servers: Workload characterization and performance implications. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 5(5):631–645, 1997.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Paul Barford, Azer Bestavros, Adam Bradley, and Mark Crovella. Changes in Web client access patterns: Characteristics and caching implications. World Wide Web, Special Issue on Characterization and Performance Evaluation, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Paul Barford and Mark E. Crovella. Generating representative Web workloads for network and server performance evaluation. In Proceedings of Performance’ 98/SIGMETRICS’ 98, pages 151–160, July 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Jean-Chrysostome Bolot and Philipp Hoschka. Performance engineering of the World Wide Web: Application to dimensioning and cache design. In Proceedings of the Fifth Interntional Conference on the WWW, Paris, France, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Lee Breslau, Pei Cao, Li Fan, Graham Phillips, and Scott Shenker. Web caching and zipf-like distributions: Evidence and implications. In Proceedings of INFOCOM’ 99, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Mark E. Crovella and Azer Bestavros. Explaining World Wide Web traffic selfsimilarity. Technical Report TR-95-015 (Revised), Boston University Department of Computer Science, October 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Mark E. Crovella and Azer Bestavros. Self-similarity in World Wide Web traffic: Evidence and possible causes. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 5(6):835–846, December 1997.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Mark E. Crovella and Lester Lipsky. Long-lasting transient conditions in simulations with heavy-tailed workloads. In Proceedings of the 1997 Winter Simulation Conference, pages 1005–1012, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Mark E. Crovella and Murad S. Taqqu. Estimating the heavy tail index from scaling properties. Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability, 1(1), 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Mark E. Crovella, Murad S. Taqqu, and Azer Bestavros. Heavy-tailed probability distributions in the World Wide Web. In A Practical Guide To Heavy Tails, chapter 1, pages 3–26. Chapman & Hall, New York, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Carlos A. Cunha, Azer Bestavros, and Mark E. Crovella. Characteristics of WWW client-based traces. Technical Report TR-95-010, Boston University Department of Computer Science, April 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  19. N. G. Duffield and Ward Whitt. Recovery from congestion in a large multi-server system. In V. Ramaswami and P. Wirth, editors, Teletraffic Contributions for the Information Age, Proceedings of the 15th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC-15), pages 371–380, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  20. A. Erramilli, O. Narayan, and W. Willinger. Experimental queueing analysis with long-range dependent packet traffic. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 4(2):209–223, April 1996.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. William Feller. An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications, volume II. John Wiley and Sons, second edition, 1971.

    Google Scholar 

  22. National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Mosaic software. Available at ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic.

  23. Steven Glassman. A caching relay for the World Wide Web. In Proceedings of the First International World Wide Web Conference, pages 69–76, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Michael Greiner, Manfred Jobmann, and Lester Lipsky. The importance of powertail distributions for telecommunication traffic models. Technical report, Institut für Informatik, T. U. München, August 25 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  25. B. M. Hill. A simple general approach to inference about the tail of a distribution. The Annals of Statistics, 3:1163–1174, 1975.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  26. W.E. Leland, M.S. Taqqu, W. Willinger, and D.V. Wilson. On the self-similar nature of Ethernet traffic (extended version). IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2:1–15, 1994.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Benoit B. Mandelbrot. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. W. H. Freedman and Co., New York, 1983.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Daniel A. Menascé and Virgílio A. F. Almeida. Capacity Planning for Web Performance: Metrics, Models, Methods. Prentice Hall, PTR, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  29. Erich Nahum, Tsipora Barzilai, and Dilip Kandlur. Performance issues in WWW servers. In Proceedings of Performance’ 99/ACM SIGMETRICS’ 99, Atlanta, GA, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  30. Norifumi Nishikawa, Takafumi Hosokawa, Yasuhide Mori, Kenichi Yoshida, and Hiroshi Tsuji. Memory-based architecture for distributed WWW caching proxy. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30:205–214, 1998.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Kihong Park, Gi Tae Kim, and Mark E. Crovella. On the relationship between file sizes, transport protocols, and self-similar network traffic. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP’96), pages 171–180, October 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  32. Kihong Park, Gi Tae Kim, and Mark E. Crovella. On the relationship between file sizes, transport protocols, and self-similar network traffic. Technical Report TR-96-006, Boston University Computer Science Department, August 7 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  33. Sidney Resnick and Catalin Starica. Tail index estimation for dependent data. Technical Report 1174, School of OR&IE, Cornell University, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  34. Gennady Samorodnitsky and Murad S. Taqqu. Stable Non-Gaussian Random Processes. Stochastic Modeling. Chapman and Hall, New York, 1994.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  35. Stephen Williams, Marc Abrams, Charles R. Standridge, Ghaleb Abdulla, and Edward A. Fox. Removal policies in network caches for World-Wide Web documents. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM’ 96, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  36. Walter Willinger, Vern Paxson, and Murad S. Taqqu. Self-similarity and heavy tails: Structural modeling of network traffic. In A Practical Guide To Heavy Tails. Chapman & Hall, New York, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Walter Willinger, Murad S. Taqqu, Robert Sherman, and Daniel V. Wilson. Selfsimilarity through high-variability: Statistical analysis of Ethernet LAN traffic at the source level. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM’ 95, pages 100–113, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  38. G. K. Zipf. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least-Effort. Addison-Wesley, Cambridge, MA, 1949.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Boston University, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    Mark E. Crovella

Authors
  1. Mark E. Crovella
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Angewandte Informatik und Informationssysteme, Universität Wien, Lenaugasse 2/8, 1080, Wien, Austria

    Günter Haring

  2. Informatik IV, Universität Dortmund, August-Schmidt-Straße 12, 44227, Dortmund, Germany

    Christoph Lindemann

  3. GMD Institut für Medienkommunikation, Schloß Birlinghoven, Postfach 1316, 53754, Sankt Augustin, Germany

    Martin Reiser

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Crovella, M.E. (2000). Performance Characteristics of the World Wide Web. In: Haring, G., Lindemann, C., Reiser, M. (eds) Performance Evaluation: Origins and Directions. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1769. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46506-5_9

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46506-5_9

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67193-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46506-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation