In this work, we describe a novel technique for measuring the web site's end-to-end response time which based on reconstruction of web page accesses from passively captured network packets at a web server side. This technique can effectively determine the set of objects composing web page without parsing or interpreting the HTML syntax. Then by using this information and a few other heuristics, we reconstruct web page accesses. Exploiting this technique, we built a tool, called EtE monitor. It can be deployed using few different configurations. In particular, it can run as a software solution at a server, or as an independent network appliance in front of the server or web server cluster. EtE monitor does not require any changes or modifications to neither site content or server side infrastructure nor client browsers, and can be used for sites with static or dynamically generated content.

Relative to existing approaches, EtE monitor offers a set of new benefits. Timestamps extracted from network packet level provide invaluable information about connection setup time, server side processing time, and network related transfer time, which can not be directly obtained from other sources.

Additionally, this technique allows us to analyze many other useful and practical metrics, such as number of aborted page accesses, number of objects retrieved directly from the server versus from network and client browser caches, number of client connections used to retrieve the web page, amount of packets resent in the response to reflect network congestion on the path to a client, etc.

Related Papers and Reports

• Y. Fu, L. Cherkasova, W. Tang, A. Vahdat: EtE: Passive End-to-End Internet Service Performance Monitoring. I In Proceedings of USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 13-15, Monterey, CA, 2002. Best Student Paper Award.

• L. Cherkasova, Y. Fu, W. Tang, A. Vahdat: Measuring End-to-End Internet Service Performance: Response Time, Caching Efficiency and QoS. HP Laboratories Report No. HPL-2002-148, 2002.