Towards understanding modern web traffic

Abstract

As the nature of Web traffic evolves over time, we must update our understanding of underlying nature of today's Web, which is necessary to improve response time, understand caching effectiveness, and to design intermediary systems, such as firewalls, security analyzers, and reporting or management systems. In this paper, we analyze five years (2006-2010) of real Web traffic from a globally-distributed proxy system, which captures the browsing behavior of over 70,000 daily users from 187 countries. Using this data set, we examine major changes in Web traffic characteristics during this period, and also investigate the redundancy of this traffic, using both traditional object-level caching as well as content-based approaches.