TY - GEN
T1 - Going viral
T2 - 2011 ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC'11
AU - Wendell, Patrick
AU - Freedman, Michael J.
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - Handling flash crowds poses a difficult task for web services. Content distribution networks (CDNs), hierarchical web caches, and peer-to-peer networks have all been proposed as mechanisms for mitigating the effects of these sudden spikes in traffic to under-provisioned origin sites. Other than a few anecdotal examples of isolated events to a single server, however, no large-scale analysis of flash-crowd behavior has been published to date. In this paper, we characterize and quantify the behavior of thousands of flash crowds on CoralCDN, an open content distribution network running at several hundred POPs. Our analysis considers over four years of CDN traffic, comprising more than 33 billion HTTP requests. We draw conclusions in several areas, including (i) the potential benefits of cooperative vs. independent caching by CDN nodes, (ii) the efficacy of elastic redirection and resource provisioning, and (iii) the ecosystem of portals, aggregators, and social networks that drive traffic to third-party websites.
AB - Handling flash crowds poses a difficult task for web services. Content distribution networks (CDNs), hierarchical web caches, and peer-to-peer networks have all been proposed as mechanisms for mitigating the effects of these sudden spikes in traffic to under-provisioned origin sites. Other than a few anecdotal examples of isolated events to a single server, however, no large-scale analysis of flash-crowd behavior has been published to date. In this paper, we characterize and quantify the behavior of thousands of flash crowds on CoralCDN, an open content distribution network running at several hundred POPs. Our analysis considers over four years of CDN traffic, comprising more than 33 billion HTTP requests. We draw conclusions in several areas, including (i) the potential benefits of cooperative vs. independent caching by CDN nodes, (ii) the efficacy of elastic redirection and resource provisioning, and (iii) the ecosystem of portals, aggregators, and social networks that drive traffic to third-party websites.
KW - content distribution networks
KW - flash crowds
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=82955186376&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=82955186376&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2068816.2068867
DO - 10.1145/2068816.2068867
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:82955186376
SN - 9781450310130
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC
SP - 549
EP - 557
BT - IMC'11 - Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference
Y2 - 2 November 2011 through 4 November 2011
ER -