The impact of User-Browser Interaction on web performance

Abstract

The user interaction with the current web contents is a major concern when defining web workloads in order to precisely estimate system performance. However, the intrinsic diffi- culty to represent this behavior in a workload model leads many research works to still use workloads non representative of the current web navigations. In contrast, in previous works we demonstrated that the use of an accurate workload model that considers user’s dynamism when navigating the web clearly affects system performance metrics. In this paper we analyze, for the first time, the effect of considering the User-Browser Interaction (UBI) as a part of user’s dynamic behavior on web workload characterization in performance studies. To this end, we evaluate a typical e-commerce scenario and compare the obtained results for different UBI behaviors, such as the use of the back button and parallel browsing originated by using browser tabs or opening new windows when surfing a website.