Analysis of HTTP Performance

Joe Touch, John Heidemann, and Katia Obraczka
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

We discuss the performance effects of using per-transaction TCP connections for HTTP access, and the proposed optimizations of avoiding per-transaction re-connection and TCP slow-start restart overheads. We analyze the performance penalties of the interaction of HTTP and TCP. Our observations indicate that the proposed optimizations do not substantially affect Web access for the vast majority of users, who typically see end-to-end latencies of 100-250 ms and use low bandwidth lines. Under these conditions, there are only 1-2 packets in transit between the client and server, and the optimizations reduce the overall transaction time by only 11%. Rates over 200 Kbps are required in order to achieve at least a 50% reduction in transaction time, resulting in a user-noticeable performance enhancement.

Availability

This paper is available in several formats: abstract web page with pointers and cites, gzip'ed postscript, PDF, http://www.isi.edu/touch/pubs/http-perf96/>">gzip'ed postscript, paper copies can be obtained by mail to the authors. Copyright terms for this paper appear below.

Reference

Touch98d

Joe Touch, John Heidemann, and Katia Obraczka. Analysis of HTTP Performance. Research Report98-463, USC/Information Sciences Institute, August, 1998. A revised version of a web page made public in June 1996. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Touch98d.html>.

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	author = "Joe Touch and John Heidemann and Katia Obraczka",
	title = "Analysis of {HTTP} Performance",
	institution = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
	year = "1998",
	type = "Research Report",
	number = "98-463",
	month = "August",
	note = "A revised version of a web page made public
                         in June 1996",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Touch98d.html",
	psurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Touch96b.ps.gz",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Touch96b.pdf",
	htmlurl = "http://www.isi.edu/touch/pubs/http-perf96/",
	organization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
	copyrightholder = "authors",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 1998 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted.

To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.