Analyzing factors that influence end-to-end Web performance

With the growing popularity of the Web, performance issues have come to the fore both on an intranet basis and on an Internet basis. Web performance impacts the popularity of a particular Web site or service as well as the load on the network. While Web caching has become popular and has been studied extensively, there have been no publically available end-to-end measurements that have focused on a large number of popular Web servers examining the components of delay or the e ectiveness of the recent changes to the HTTP protocol. In this paper we report on an extensive study carried out from several client sites geographically distributed around the world to a collection of over 700 servers to which a majority of Web tra c is directed. Our results show that the primary changes in the recently draft standardized HTTP/1.1 protocol are indeed useful but further examination is warranted.