Measured HTTP Performance and Fun Factors

Recent work has emphasized the importance of pure delay components as well as rate components in the user perceived performance of elastic Internet applications, namely Web browsing. “Fun factors” have been previously introduced to describe the obtained performance with respect to the maximum possible performance on a scale of zero (no fun) to one (maximum fun). In this paper, several options for defining such fun factors using delay and rate components are presented. In order to better understand the influence of delays and transmission rates, two extensive traffic traces have been evaluated (a) to yield information about the way browsers use persistent and parallel HTTP/TCP connections to access Web servers and (b) to serve as an example for quantifying quality of service with fun factors.