A Tool to measure HTTP performance

Abstract

The World Wide Web is one of the most popular services on the Internet today. Users of the Internet demand better performance for their web access. In order to meet this requirement, network administrators and engineers try their best to harness the maximum performance from the available resources. High performance for web services can be achieved by using cache-proxies, traffic shifting, mirroring or increasing the available bandwidth. We have identified a need to compare the effect of performance before and after changing different network parameters. The objective of this project is to develop a tool that measures and compares HTTP performance under different conditions. This tool also enables the network administrator to conduct the measurements without user involvement. TCPDUMP was used to capture IP packets transmitted over the broadcast LAN. This capturing process was transparent to users. The captured data was used to identify different web requests, relevant responses and other related statistics. Using these statistics, the tool can regenerate the same web requests, at a later time, under different network conditions and can measure the performance parameters of the network. The tool finally presents a comparison of the performance, so that an administrator can get a quantitative figure of the impact of the changes that he has done.