Characterizing roles of front-end servers in end-to-end performance of dynamic content distribution

Yingying Chen, Sourabh Jain, Vijay Kumar Adhikari, Zhi-Li Zhang

Abstract: This paper investigates the roles of front-end (proxy) servers in improving user-perceived performance of dynamic content distribution. Using Bing and Google search services as two case studies, we perform extensive network measurement and analysis to understand several key factors that affect the overall user-perceived performance. In particular, we develop a simple model-based inference framework to indirectly measure and quantify the (directly unobservable) "frontend-to-backend fetching time" comprised of the query processing time at back-end data centers and the delivery time between the back-end data centers and front-end servers. We show that this fetching time plays a critical role in the end-to-end performance of dynamic content delivery.