Traffic analysis of a Web proxy caching hierarchy

Understanding Web traffic characteristics is key to improving the performance and scalability of the Web. In this article Web proxy workloads from different levels of a caching hierarchy are used to understand how the workload characteristics change across different levels of a caching hierarchy. The main observations of this study are that HTML and image documents account for 95 percent of the documents seen in the workload; the distribution of transfer sizes of documents is heavy-tailed, with the tails becoming heavier as one moves up the caching hierarchy; the popularity profile of documents does not precisely follow the Zipf distribution; one-timers account for approximately 70 percent of the documents referenced; concentration of references is less at proxy caches than at servers, and concentration of references diminishes as one moves up the caching hierarchy; and the modification rate is higher at higher-level proxies.