Going viral

Abstract

Handling flash crowds poses a difficult task for web services. Content distribution networks (CDNs), hierarchical web caches, and peer-to-peer networks have all been proposed as mechanisms for mitigating the effects of these sudden spikes in traffic to under-provisioned origin sites. Other than a few anecdotal examples of isolated events to a single server, however, no large-scale analysis of flash-crowd behavior has been published to date.