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USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, 1997
Web Facts and Fantasy
Stephen Manley
Network Appliance
Margo Seltzer
Harvard University
Abstract
There is a great deal of research about improving
Web server performance and building better, faster
servers, but little research in characterizing servers
and the load imposed upon them. While some
tremendously popular and busy sites, such as
netscape.com, playboy.com, and altavista.com,
receive several million hits per day, most servers
are never subjected to loads of this magnitude. This
paper presents the analysis of internet Web server
logs for a variety of different types of sites. We
present a taxonomy of the different types of Web
sites and characterize their access patterns and,
more importantly, their growth. We then use our
server logs to address some common perceptions
about the Web. We show that, on a variety of sites,
contrary to popular belief, the use of CGI does not
appear to be increasing and that long latencies are
not necessarily due to server loading. We then
show that, as expected, persistent connections are
generally useful, but that dynamic time-out
intervals may be unnecessarily complex and that
allowing multiple persistent connections per client
may actually hinder resource utilization compared
to allowing only a single persistent connection.
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