Characterizing user sessions on YouTube
Phillipa Gill, Martin F. Arlitt, Zongpeng Li, Anirban Mahanti · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2008
In this study, we characterize user sessions of the popular multimedia Web 2.0 site, YouTube. We observe YouTube user sessions by making measurements from an edge network perspective. Several characteristics of user sessions are considered, including session duration, inter-transaction times, and the types of content transferred by user sessions. We compare and contrast our results with "traditional" Web user sessions. We found that YouTube users transfer more data and have longer think times than traditional Web workloads. These differences have implications for network capacity planning and design of next generation synthetic Web workloads.