Abstract

Content distribution networks (CDNs) are increasingly used to deliver high-performance web services. As the volume of content grows, these networks constantly evolve to improve performance. Their performance is difficult to characterize because it depends on factors including the distribution of clients, the geographical scope of the CDN, the specific way in which the content delivery is engineered, and so on. In this paper, we ask the following question: given two CDNs, how do we determine whether one CDN’s user-perceived performance is significantly better than another? In a departure from prior work, we propose a methodology called DBit that identifies distributional differences in user-perceived performance, and we apply it to several CDNs that serve photos. Using 14.5 million photo fetches on PlanetLab from three popular CDNs over a period of 8 months, we find that DBit can identify significant …

Date

2015

Authors

Zahaib Akhtar, Alefiya Hussain, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Ramesh Govindan

Journal

University of Southern California, Computer Science Department, Tech. Rep

Pages

15-957