Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Flash Crowds on the Internet

A flash crowd is a surge in traffic to a particular web site that causes the site to be virtually unreachable. We present a model of flash crowd events and evaluate the performance of various multi-level caching techniques suitable for managing these events. Our results show that significant reductions in client response times and server and network loads can be achieved during flash crowds using basic caching techniques, and even more savings can be realized with judicious choice of replacement algorithms and placement of proxies.