Measuring quality of Web users experience (WebQoE) faces the following trade-off. On the one hand, current practice is to resort to metrics, such as the document completion time (onLoad), that are simple to measure though knowingly inaccurate. On the other hand, there are metrics, like Google’s SpeedIndex, that are better correlated with the actual user experience, but are quite complex to evaluate and, as such, relegated to lab experiments. In this paper, we first provide a comprehensive state of the art on the metrics and tools available for WebQoE assessment. We then apply these metrics to a representative dataset (the Alexa top-100 webpages) to better illustrate their similarities, differences, advantages, and limitations. We next introduce novel metrics, inspired by Google’s SpeedIndex, that offer significant advantage in terms of computational complexity, while maintaining a high correlation with the SpeedIndex. These properties make our proposed metrics highly relevant and of practical use.
Personal cloud storage services are data-intensive applications already producing a significant share of Internet traffic. Several solutions offered by different companies attract more and more people. However, little is known about each service capabilities, architecture and -most of all -performance implications of design choices. This paper presents a methodology to study cloud storage services. We apply our methodology to compare 5 popular offers, revealing different system architectures and capabilities. The implications on performance of different designs are assessed executing a series of benchmarks. Our results show no clear winner, with all services suffering from some limitations or having potential for improvement. In some scenarios, the upload of the same file set can take seven times more, wasting twice as much capacity. Our methodology and results are useful thus as both benchmark and guideline for system design. 1
The large amount of space offered by personal cloud storage services (e.g., Dropbox and OneDrive), together with the possibility of synchronizing devices seamlessly, keep attracting customers to the cloud. Despite the high public interest, little information about system design and actual implications on performance is available when selecting a cloud storage service. Systematic benchmarks to assist in comparing services and understanding the effects of design choices are still lacking. This paper proposes a methodology to understand and benchmark personal cloud storage services. Our methodology unveils their architecture and capabilities. Moreover, by means of repeatable and customizable tests, it allows the measurement of performance metrics under different workloads. The effectiveness of the methodology is shown in a case study in which 11 services are compared under the same conditions. Our case study reveals interesting differences in design choices. Their implications are assessed in a series of benchmarks. Results show no clear winner, with all services having potential for improving performance. In some scenarios, the synchronization of the same files can take 20 times longer. In other cases, we observe a wastage of twice as much network capacity, questioning the design of some services. Our methodology and results are thus useful both as benchmarks and as guidelines for system design.
This work focuses on the evaluation of Web quality of experience as perceived by actual users and in particular on the impact of HTTP/1 vs HTTP/2. We adopt an experimental methodology that uses real web pages served through a realistic testbed where we control network, protocol, and application configuration. Users are asked to browse such pages and provide their subjective feedback, which we leverage to obtain the Mean Opinion Score (MOS), while the testbed records objective metrics. The collected dataset comprises over 4,000 grades that we explore to tackle the question whether HTTP/2 improves users experience, to what extent, and in which conditions. Findings show that users report marginal differences, with 22%, 52%, 26% of HTTP/2 MOS being better, identical, or worse than HTTP/1, respectively. Even in scenarios that favor HTTP/2, results are not as sharp as expected. This is in contrast with objective metrics, which instead record a positive impact with HTTP/2 usage. This shows the complexity of understanding the web experience and the need to involve actual users in the quality assessment process.
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