EtE: Passive End-to-End Internet Service Performance Monitoring

Abstract

This paper presents, EtE monitor, a novel approach to measuring web site performance. Our system passively collects packet traces from a server site to determine serviceperformance characteristics. We introduce a two-pass heuristic method and a statistical filtering mechanism to accurately reconstruct different client page accesses and to measure performance characteristics integrated across all client accesses. Relative to existing approaches, EtE monitor offers the following benefits: i) a breakdown between the network and server overhead of retrieving a web page, ii) longitudinal information for all client accesses, not just the subset probed by a third party, iii) characteristics of accesses that are aborted by clients, and iv) quantification of the benefits of network and browser caches on server performance. Our initial implementation and performance analysis across two sample sites confirm the utility of our approach.