A Longitudinal View of HTTP Traffic

In this paper we analyze three and a half years of HTTP traffic observed at a small research institute to characterize the evolution of various facets of web operation. While our dataset is modest in terms of user population, it is unique in its temporal breadth. We leverage the longitudinal data to study various characteristics of the traffic, from client and server behavior to object and connection characteristics. In addition, we assess how the delivery of content is structured across our datasets, including the use of browser caches, the efficacy of network-based proxy caches, and the use of content delivery networks. While each of the aspects we study has been investigated to some extent in prior work, our contribution is a unique long-term characterization.