Analyzing factors that influence end-to-end Web performance

Web performance impacts the popularity of a particular Web site or service as well as the load on the network, but there have been no publicly availab le end-to-end measurements that have focused on a large number of popular W eb servers examining the components of delay or the effectiveness of the re cent changes to the HTTP protocol. In this paper we report on an extensive study carried out from many client sites geographically distributed around the world to a collection of over 700 servers to which a majority of Web tr affic is directed. Our results show that the HTTP/1.1 protocol, particularl y with pipelining, is indeed an improvement over existing practice, but tha t servers serving a small number of objects or closing a persistent. connec tion without explicit notification can reduce or eliminate any performance improvement. Similarly, use of caching and multi-server content distributio n can also improve performance if done effectively. (C) 2000 Published by E lsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.