ABSTRACT
In this work we propose a stochastic model for describing the Web traffic at request level. We concentrate on the HTTP requests to the same Web server and we are interested in the typical behavior of the clients' hypertext navigation. The mathematical model is defined by a stochastic marked point process which describes when clients arrive and how they browse the server. We have developed a benchmark tool of Web servers: WAGON. It comprises a generator of Web traffic, a robot which sends and analyzes requests and a monitoring tool. It can generate different types of traffic requests, which, in turn, can be sent out to the server from different machines with different (simulated) delays and bandwidth constraints. Using such a tool we have carried out experiments and compared the performance between HTTP1.0 and HTTP1.1 under different configurations. Our results indicate that HTTP 1.1 almost always outperforms HTTP 1.0, and this is true even if the latter uses more parallel connections and slightly larger bandwidth. The difference in request response time becomes more significant when the network is heavily loaded. The response time of clients using HTTP 1.0 with a single connection could be ten times larger than those using HTTP1.1.
