The response time of a WWW service often plays an important role in
its success or demise. From a user’s perspective, the response time
is the time elapsed from when a request is initiated at a client to
the time that the response is fully loaded by the client. This project
presents a framework for accurately measuring the client-perceived
response time in a WWW service. Our framework provides feedback to
the service provider and eliminates the uncertainties that are common
in existing methods. This feedback can be used to determine whether
performance expectations are met, and whether additional resources
(e.g. more powerful server or better network connection) are needed.
The framework can also be used when a consolidator provides Web hosting
service, in which case the framework provides quantitative measures
to verify the consolidator’s compliance to a specified Service Level
Agreement. Our approach assumes the existing infrastructure of the
Internet with its current technologies and protocols. No modification
is necessary to existing browsers or servers, and we accommodate intermediate
proxies that cache documents. The only requirement is to instrument
the documents to be measured, which can be done automatically using
a tool we provide.
Project Contributors: Ram Rajamony and Mootaz Elnozahy. For more information
regarding this project, contact rajamony@us.ibm.com.
Published in the Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX Symposium on Internet
Technologies and Systems (USITS), March 2001, San Francisco. Pages
185-196
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