Abstract

The phenomenal growth in popularity of the World-Wide Web (WWW or "the Web") has made WWW traffic the fastest growing component of network packet and byte traffic on the NSFNET backbone. This growth has triggered much recent research activity aimed at improving Web performance and scalability: reducing the volume of network traffic produced by Web clients and servers by using file/document 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 thesis presents a workload characterization study for World-Wide 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...

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