Aliasing on the world wide web: prevalence and performance implications

Aliasing occurs in Web transactions when requests containing different URLs elicit replies containing identical data payloads. Conventional caches associate stored data with URLs and can therefore suffer redundant payload transfers due to aliasing and other causes. Existing research literature, however, says little about the prevalence of aliasing in user-initiated transactions, or about redundant payload transfers in conventional Web cache hierarchies. This paper quantifies the extent of aliasing and the performance impact of URL-indexed cache management using a large client trace from WebTV Networks. Fewer than 5% of reply payloads are aliased (referenced via multiple URLs) but over 54% of successful transactions involve aliased payloads. Aliased payloads account for under 3.1% of the trace's "working set size" (sum of payload sizes) but over 36% of bytes transferred. For the WebTV workload, roughly 10% of payload transfers to browser caches and 23% of payload transfe...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Terence Kelly, Jeffrey C. Mogul
• Keywords: Internet Technology, Redundant Payload Transfers, Redundant Proxy-to-browser Payload, Redundant Transfers, WWW 2002