WWW Proxy Traffic Characterization with Application to Caching

Characterizing World Wide Web proxy traffic helps identify parameters that affect caching, capacity planning and simulation studies. In this paper we identify invariants that hold across a collection of ten traces representing traffic seen by caching-proxy servers. The traces were collected from governmental, industry, university, high school, and an online service provider environment, with request rates that range from a few accesses to millions of accesses per hour. We also show that the examined traffic is semi-similar. We explore sources of Web self-similarity and we conclude that a strong source is the periodicity in the users behavior. The tests revealed that there is a strong connection between access rate from hour to hour. We also report the hit rate and weighted hit rate obtained by running a trace driven simulation on the workloads to simulate a proxy with infinite cache, similarly, accesses to unique servers and URLs are a small portion of the total. By considering these characteristics of traffic we can improve the utility of caching for WWW clients.