An analysis of web performance and caching

Abstract

The overall increase in traffic on the World Wide Web causes a disproportionate newlineincrease in client requests to popular Web sites especially in conjunction with newlinespecial events such as Olympic Games and the NASA Pathfinder or September newline11 terrorists attack on the World Trade Center Site administrators constantly newlineface the need to improve server capacity For Web browsing the perceived newlinedelay of information access is the single most important criterion newlineResearchers are exploring improvements in Internet performance from several newlineangles like newlineInfrastructure Infrastructure comprises gigabit networks cable modem newlineand asymmetrical digital subscriber loop ADSL technologies that will newlineenable multimegabit access for homes newlineProtocols The design of the new hypertext transfer protocols like HTTPNG newlineThe notion of a quotnext generationquot HTTP arose from studying the newlineInternet congestion problem caused by the Web Another key design goal newlinewas to improve the performance The new architecture should support newlineJAVA RMI CORBA and DCOM applications newlineCompression Data compression directly targets the transmission of newlineredundant bits within a single transfer Better encoding techniques newlineespecially for multimedia files can significantly reduce the traffic With newlinethe increased transmission of new data types eg JAVA byte codes and newlineother software one can expect to see the progress on new compression newlinetechniques newlineCaching Caches placed at various points on the Web can dramatically newlinereduce the need to repeatedly reload the same Web page from a remote newlinesite Of the four approaches caching promises the greatest performance gain and can newlinebe implemented with current technologies It is the only approach that addresses newlinethe physical distances between users and Web objects Deploying caches close newlineto clients can reduce overall backbone traffic considerably Cache hits eliminate newlinethe need to contact the originating server Thus additional network newlinecommunication can be avoided Caches not only improve availability and fault newlinetolerance of their associated Web servers but also act as load balanc