Measuring Web Performance in the Wide Area
Date
1999-04-23
DOI
Authors
Barford, Paul R.
Crovella, Mark
Version
OA Version
Citation
Barford, Paul; Crovella, Mark. "Measuring Web Performance in the Wide Area", Technical Report BUCS-1999-004, Computer Science Department, Boston University, April 23, 1999. [Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/2144/1781]
Abstract
One of the most vexing questions facing researchers interested in the World Wide Web is why users often experience long delays in document retrieval. The Internet's size, complexity, and continued growth make this a difficult question to answer. We describe the Wide Area Web Measurement project (WAWM) which uses an infrastructure distributed across the Internet to study Web performance. The infrastructure enables simultaneous measurements of Web client performance, network performance and Web server performance. The infrastructure uses a Web traffic generator to create representative workloads on servers, and both active and passive tools to measure performance characteristics. Initial results based on a prototype installation of the infrastructure are presented in this paper.