Workload Characterization of a Personalized Web Site — And Its Implications for Dynamic Content Caching
Weisong Shi, R. B. Wright, Eli Collins, Vijay Karamcheti · 2002
Requests for dynamic and personalized content have become an important part of current-day Internet traffic; however, traditional caching architectures are not wellsuited to cache such content. Several recently proposed techniques, which exploit reuse at the sub-document level, promise to address this shortcoming, but require a better understanding of the workloads seen on web sites that serve such content. In this paper, we study the characteristics of a mediumsized personalized web site, NYUHome, which is a customizable portal used by approximately 44,000 users from the New York University community. Our study leverages detailed server-side traces of client activity over a two-week period in February 2002, obtained by instrumenting the NYUHome server. The paper presents statistics on document composition, personalization behavior, server-side overheads, and clientperceived request latencies. We then use these statistics to derive general implications for efficient caching and edge generation of dynamic content in the context of our ongoing CONCA project. Our study verifies both the need for and likely benefit from caching content at sub-document granularity, and points to additional opportunities for reducing client-perceived latency using prefetching, access prediction, content transcoding, and migrating channel generation functionality to the edge. 1