Managing flash crowds on the Internet

Appeared in Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS '03).

Abstract

A flash crowd is a surge in traffic to a particular Web site that causes the site to be virtually unreachable. We present a model of flash crowd events and evaluate the performance of various multi-level caching techniques suitable for managing these events. By using well-dispersed caches and with judicious choice of replacement algorithms we show reductions in client response times by as much as a factor of 25. We also show that these caches eliminate the server and network hot spots by distributing the load over the entire network.

Publication date:
October 2003

Authors:
Ismail Ari
Bo Hong
Ethan L. Miller
Scott A. Brandt
Darrell D. E. Long

Projects:
Adaptive Caching

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{ari-mascots03,
  author       = {Ismail Ari and Bo Hong and Ethan L. Miller and Scott A. Brandt and Darrell D. E. Long},
  title        = {Managing flash crowds on the Internet},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS '03)},
  pages        = {246–249},
  month        = oct,
  year         = {2003},
}