Web Performance in Practice - Why We are Waiting
Joachim Charzinski
Abstract
Web browsing is the application producing most of the traffic observed
on the Internet backbones today. While this is obviously an enormous
success for a single application that was created only a decade
ago, many users experience Web access as a ``world wide waiting'' process.
In this paper, statistical evidence based on two long-term
IP traffic traces is given for the amount of
waiting time which is due to different phases of a Web connection --
domain name lookup, connection establishment, requesting and
finally transferring an item. Nearly half the delay
in an average HTTP/TCP connection is due to the first three components
and only the rest can be influenced significantly by higher speed
access systems for large downloads.
Keywords
Internet; Internet Traffic; WWW; User Perceived QoS;
HTTP Traffic; DNS Latency; Loss; Measurement