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

Abstract

This paper investigates the roles of front-end (proxy) servers in improving user-perceived performance of dynamic con-tent distribution. Using Bing and Google search services as two case studies, we perform extensive network measure-ment and analysis to understand several key factors that affect the overall user-perceived performance. In particu-lar, we develop a simple model-based inference framework to indirectly measure and quantify the (directly unobserv-able) “frontend-to-backend fetching time ” comprised of the query processing time at back-end data centers and the de-livery 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