Towards Understanding Modern Web Traffic (2011)

by S Ihm, V S Pai
Venue:In ACM IMC
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Demystify page load performance with WProf

by Xiao Sophia Wang, Aruna Balasubramanian, Arvind Krishnamurthy, David Wetherall - In USENIX NSDI , 2013
"... Web page load time is a key performance metric that many techniques aim to reduce. Unfortunately, the complexity of modern Web pages makes it difficult to identify performance bottlenecks. We present WProf, a lightweight in-browser profiler that produces a detailed dependency graph of the activities ..."
Abstract - Cited by 30 (5 self) - Add to MetaCart
Web page load time is a key performance metric that many techniques aim to reduce. Unfortunately, the complexity of modern Web pages makes it difficult to identify performance bottlenecks. We present WProf, a lightweight in-browser profiler that produces a detailed dependency graph of the activities that make up a page load. WProf is based on a model we developed to capture the constraints between network load, page parsing, JavaScript/CSS evaluation, and rendering activity in popular browsers. We combine WProf reports with critical path analysis to study the page load time of 350 Web pages under a variety of settings including the use of end-host caching, SPDY instead of HTTP, and the mod pagespeed server extension. We find that computation is a significant factor that makes up as much as 35% of the critical path, and that synchronous JavaScript plays a significant role in page load time by blocking HTML parsing. Caching reduces page load time, but the reduction is not proportional to the number of cached objects, because most object loads are not on the critical path. SPDY reduces page load time only for networks with high RTTs and mod pagespeed helps little on an average page. 1
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mTCP: a highly scalable user-level TCP stack for multicore systems

by Eunyoung Jeong, Shinae Woo, Muhammad Jamshed, Haewon Jeong, Sunghwan Ihm, Dongsu Han, Kyoungsoo Park - In Proc. 11th USENIX NSDI , 2014
"... Scaling the performance of short TCP connections on multicore systems is fundamentally challenging. Although many proposals have attempted to address various short-comings, inefficiency of the kernel implementation still persists. For example, even state-of-the-art designs spend 70 % to 80 % of CPU ..."
Abstract - Cited by 19 (2 self) - Add to MetaCart
Scaling the performance of short TCP connections on multicore systems is fundamentally challenging. Although many proposals have attempted to address various short-comings, inefficiency of the kernel implementation still persists. For example, even state-of-the-art designs spend 70 % to 80 % of CPU cycles in handling TCP connections in the kernel, leaving only small room for innovation in the user-level program. This work presents mTCP, a high-performance user-level TCP stack for multicore systems. mTCP addresses the inefficiencies from the ground up—from packet I/O and TCP connection management to the application inter-face. In addition to adopting well-known techniques, our design (1) translates multiple expensive system calls into a single shared memory reference, (2) allows efficient flow-level event aggregation, and (3) performs batched packet I/O for high I/O efficiency. Our evaluations on an 8-core machine showed that mTCP improves the performance of small message transactions by a factor of 25 compared to the latest Linux TCP stack and a factor of 3 compared to the best-performing research system known so far. It also improves the performance of various popular applications by 33 % to 320 % compared to those on the Linux stack. 1
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A Survey of Information-Centric Networking Research

by George Xylomenos, Christopher N. Ververidis, Vasilios A. Siris, Nikos Fotiou, Christos Tsilopoulos, Xenofon Vasilakos, Konstantinos V. Katsaros, George C. Polyzos - PUBLISHED IN: COMMUNICATIONS SURVEYS AND TUTORIALS (TO APPEAR)
"... The current Internet architecture was founded upon a host-centric communication model, which was appropriate for coping with the needs of the early Internet users. Internet usage has evolved however, with most users mainly interested in accessing (vast amounts of) information, irrespective of its ph ..."
Abstract - Cited by 16 (2 self) - Add to MetaCart
The current Internet architecture was founded upon a host-centric communication model, which was appropriate for coping with the needs of the early Internet users. Internet usage has evolved however, with most users mainly interested in accessing (vast amounts of) information, irrespective of its physical location. This paradigm shift in the usage model of the Internet, along with the pressing needs for, among others, better security and mobility support, has led researchers into considering a radical change to the Internet architecture. In this direction, we have witnessed many research efforts investigating Information-Centric Networking (ICN) as a foundation upon which the Future Internet can be built. Our main aims in this survey are: (a) to identify the core functionalities of ICN architectures, (b) to describe the key ICN proposals in a tutorial manner, highlighting the similarities and differences among them with respect to those core functionalities, and (c) to identify the key weaknesses of ICN proposals and to outline the main unresolved research challenges in this area of networking research.
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Comparison of Caching Strategies in Modern Cellular Backhaul Networks

by Shinae Woo, Eunyoung Jeong, Shinjo Park, Jongmin Lee, Sunghwan Ihm, Kyoungsoo Park
"... Recent popularity of smartphones drives rapid growth in the de-mand for cellular network bandwidth. Unfortunately, due to the centralized architecture of cellular networks, increasing the physical backhaul bandwidth is challenging. While content caching in cel-lular networks could be beneficial, lit ..."
Abstract - Cited by 14 (7 self) - Add to MetaCart
Recent popularity of smartphones drives rapid growth in the de-mand for cellular network bandwidth. Unfortunately, due to the centralized architecture of cellular networks, increasing the physical backhaul bandwidth is challenging. While content caching in cel-lular networks could be beneficial, little is known about the traffic characteristics to devise a highly-effective caching strategy. In this work, we provide insight into flow and content-level char-acteristics of modern 3G traffic at a large cellular ISP in South Korea. We first develop a scalable deep flow inspection (DFI) system that can manage hundreds of thousands of concurrent TCP flows on a commodity multicore server. Our DFI system collects various HTTP/TCP-level statistics and produces logs for analyzing the ef-fectiveness of conventional Web caching, prefix-based Web caching, and TCP-level redundancy elimination (RE) without a single packet drop at a 10 Gbps link. Our week-long measurements of over 370 TBs of the 3G traffic reveal that standard Web caching can reduce download bandwidth consumption up to 27.1 % while simple TCP-level RE can save the bandwidth consumption up to 42.0 % with a cache of 512 GB of RAM. We also find that applying TCP-level RE on the largest 9.4 % flows eliminates 68.4 % of the total redundancy. Most of the redundancy (52.1%∼58.9%) comes from serving the same HTTP objects while the contribution by aliased URLs is up to
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Follow the money: Understanding economics of online aggregation and advertising

by Phillipa Gill, Vijay Erramilli, Augustin Chaintreau, Bala Krishnamurthy, Dina Papagiannaki, Pablo Rodriguez - in Proc. IMC ’13 , 2013
"... The large-scale collection and exploitation of personal infor-mation to drive targeted online advertisements has raised privacy concerns. As a step towards understanding these concerns, we study the relationship between how much in-formation is collected and how valuable it is for advertising. We us ..."
Abstract - Cited by 11 (2 self) - Add to MetaCart
The large-scale collection and exploitation of personal infor-mation to drive targeted online advertisements has raised privacy concerns. As a step towards understanding these concerns, we study the relationship between how much in-formation is collected and how valuable it is for advertising. We use HTTP traces consisting of millions of users to aid our study and also present the first comparative study between aggregators. We develop a simple model that captures the various parameters of today’s advertising revenues, whose values are estimated via the traces. Our results show that per aggregator revenue is skewed (5 % accounting for 90% of revenues), while the contribution of users to advertising revenue is much less skewed (20 % accounting for 80 % of revenue). Google is dominant in terms of revenue and reach (presence on 80 % of publishers). We also show that if all 5 % of the top users in terms of revenue were to install pri-vacy protection, with no corresponding reaction from the publishers, then the revenue can drop by 30%.
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Characterizing and Mitigating Web Performance Bottlenecks in Broadband Access Networks

by Srikanth Sundaresan, Nazanin Magharei, Nick Feamster, Renata Teixeira
"... We present the first large-scale analysis of Web performance bottlenecks as measured from broadband access networks, using data collected from two extensive home router deployments. We design and implement tools and methods to identify the contribution of critical factors such as DNS lookups and TCP ..."
Abstract - Cited by 10 (1 self) - Add to MetaCart
We present the first large-scale analysis of Web performance bottlenecks as measured from broadband access networks, using data collected from two extensive home router deployments. We design and implement tools and methods to identify the contribution of critical factors such as DNS lookups and TCP connection establishment to Web page load times and characterize how they contribute to page load times in broadband networks. We find that, as the connection speeds of broadband networks continue to increase, other factors such as TCP connection setup time, server response time, and network latency are often dominant performance bottlenecks. Thus, realizing a “faster Web ” requires not only higher download throughput, but also optimizations to reduce both client and server-side latency. We deploy three common caching optimizations inside home networks to reduce latency—content caching, TCP connection caching, and DNS caching—and evaluate their effects on the factors that contribute to page load times in broadband networks. 1.
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Maygh: Building a CDN from client web browsers

by Liang Zhang, Fangfei Zhou, Alan Mislove, Ravi Sundaram
"... Over the past two decades, the web has provided dramatic improvements in the ease of sharing content. Unfortunately, the costs of distributing this content are largely incurred by web site operators; popular web sites are required to make substantial monetary investments in serving infrastructure or ..."
Abstract - Cited by 5 (0 self) - Add to MetaCart
Over the past two decades, the web has provided dramatic improvements in the ease of sharing content. Unfortunately, the costs of distributing this content are largely incurred by web site operators; popular web sites are required to make substantial monetary investments in serving infrastructure or cloud computing resources—or must pay other organizations (e.g., content distribution networks)—to help serve content. Previous approaches to offloading some of the distribution costs onto end users have relied on client-side software or web browser plug-ins, providing poor user incentives and dramatically limiting their scope in practice. In this paper, we present Maygh, a system that builds acontentdistributionnetworkfromclientwebbrowsers, without the need for additional plug-ins or client-side software. The result is an organically scalable system that distributes the cost of serving web content across the users of a web site. Through simulations based on real-world access logs from Etsy (a large e-commerce web site that is the 50th most popular web site in the U.S.), microbenchmarks, and a small-scale deployment, we demonstrate that Maygh provides substantial savings to site operators, imposes only modest costs on clients, and can be deployed on the web sites and browsers of today. In fact, if Maygh was deployed to Etsy, it would reduce network bandwidth due to static content by 75 % and require only a single coordinating server.
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How Much Can We Micro-Cache Web Pages?

by Xiao Sophia Wang, Arvind Krishnamurthy, David Wetherall
"... Browser caches are widely used to improve the performance of Web page loads. Unfortunately, current object-based caching is too coarse-grained to minimize the costs associ-ated with small, localized updates to a Web object. In this paper, we evaluate the benefits if caching were performed at a finer ..."
Abstract - Cited by 4 (0 self) - Add to MetaCart
Browser caches are widely used to improve the performance of Web page loads. Unfortunately, current object-based caching is too coarse-grained to minimize the costs associ-ated with small, localized updates to a Web object. In this paper, we evaluate the benefits if caching were performed at a finer granularity and at different levels (i.e., computed layout and compiled JavaScript). By analyzing Web pages gathered over two years, we find that both layout and code are highly cacheable, suggesting that our proposal can rad-ically reduce time to first paint. We also find that mobile pages are similar to their desktop counterparts in terms of the amount and composition of updates.
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Youtube live and twitch: A tour of usergenerated live streaming systems

by Karine Pires, Telecom Bretagne, Gwendal Simon, Telecom Bretagne - In Proc. of ACM MMSys (dataset track
"... User-Generated live video streaming systems are services that allow anybody to broadcast a video stream over the Internet. These Over-The-Top services have recently gained popularity, in particular with e-sport, and can now be seen as competitors of the traditional cable TV. In this paper, we presen ..."
Abstract - Cited by 3 (1 self) - Add to MetaCart
User-Generated live video streaming systems are services that allow anybody to broadcast a video stream over the Internet. These Over-The-Top services have recently gained popularity, in particular with e-sport, and can now be seen as competitors of the traditional cable TV. In this paper, we present a dataset for further works on these systems. This dataset contains data on the two main user-generated live streaming systems: Twitch and the live service of YouTube. We got three months of traces of these services from January to April 2014. Our dataset includes, at every five minutes, the identifier of the online broadcaster, the number of people watching the stream, and various other media information. In this paper, we introduce the dataset and we make a pre-liminary study to show the size of the dataset and its poten-tials. We first show that both systems generate a significant traffic with frequent peaks at more than 1 Tbps. Thanks to more than a million unique uploaders, Twitch is in par-ticular able to offer a rich service at anytime. Our second main observation is that the popularity of these channels is more heterogeneous than what have been observed in other services gathering user-generated content.
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Understanding and Improving Modern Web Traffic Caching

by Sunghwan Ihm, Adviser Vivek, S. Pai , 2011
"... The WorldWide Web is one of the most popular and important Internet applications, and our daily lives heavily rely on it. Despite its importance, the current Web access is still limited for two reasons: (1) the Web has changed and grown significantly as social networking, video streaming, and file h ..."
Abstract - Cited by 2 (0 self) - Add to MetaCart
The WorldWide Web is one of the most popular and important Internet applications, and our daily lives heavily rely on it. Despite its importance, the current Web access is still limited for two reasons: (1) the Web has changed and grown significantly as social networking, video streaming, and file hosting sites have become popular, requiring more and more bandwidth, and (2) the need for Web access also has grown, and many users in bandwidth-limited environments, such as people in the developing world or mobile device users, still suffer from poor Web access. There was a burst of research a decade ago aimed at understanding the nature of Web traffic and thus improving Web access, but unfortunately, it has dropped off just as the Web has changed significantly. As a result, we have little understanding of the underlying nature of today’s Web traffic, and thus miss traffic optimization opportunitiesforimprovingWebaccess. TohelpimproveWebaccess, thisdissertation attempts to fill the missing gap between previous research and today’s Web. Forabetter understanding of today’sWebtraffic, we first analyze five years(2006-2010) of real Web traffic from a globally-distributed proxy system, which captures
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