Modeling the Dropbox client behavior

Gonçalves, Glauber Dias; Drago, Idílio; Silva, Ana Paula Couto da; Vieira, Alex Borges; Almeida, Jussara M.

doi:10.1109/icc.2014.6883506

Cited by 17 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 17 publications

(28 reference statements)

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“…Some works [1], [18], [19] focus on the characterization of a specific cloud storage service from passive measurements obtained in the network. Those measurements are used to build an initial model for the Dropbox client behavior in [20]. Security threats for cloud storage services are discussed in [13], [21], in which the internal functioning of Dropbox is also revealed by means of reverse engineering in a lab environment.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personal Cloud Storage Benchmarks and Comparison

Bocchi

Drago

Mellia

2017

IEEE Trans. Cloud Comput.

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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.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personal Cloud Storage Benchmarks and Comparison

Bocchi

Drago

Mellia

2017

IEEE Trans. Cloud Comput.

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“…They analyzed and characterized the traffic generated by users, as well as the workflow and architecture of the service. [29] extended that measurement by modeling the behavior of Dropbox users. Similarly, Mager et al [28] uncovered the architecture and data management of Wuala, a peer-assisted Personal Cloud.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Perhaps surprisingly, despite their commercial popularity, only few research works have turned attention to analyze the performance of Personal Cloud storage services [2,3,5,6,7,12,28,29]. We classify them into two categories:…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dissecting UbuntuOne

Gracia-Tinedo

Tian

Sampé

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 2015 Internet Measurement Conference

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Personal Cloud services, such as Dropbox or Box, have been widely adopted by users. Unfortunately, very little is known about the internal operation and general characteristics of Personal Clouds since they are proprietary services.In this paper, we focus on understanding the nature of Personal Clouds by presenting the internal structure and a measurement study of UbuntuOne (U1). We first detail the U1 architecture, core components involved in the U1 metadata service hosted in the datacenter of Canonical, as well as the interactions of U1 with Amazon S3 to outsource data storage. To our knowledge, this is the first research work to describe the internals of a large-scale Personal Cloud.Second, by means of tracing the U1 servers, we provide an extensive analysis of its back-end activity for one month. Our analysis includes the study of the storage workload, the user behavior and the performance of the U1 metadata store. Moreover, based on our analysis, we suggest improvements to U1 that can also benefit similar Personal Cloud systems.Finally, we contribute our dataset to the community, which is the first to contain the back-end activity of a large-scale Personal Cloud. We believe that our dataset provides unique opportunities for extending research in the field.

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“…This result implies that the processes need to be completed before and after the synchronization between the client and the cloud server(s) such as chunking, bundling, client-side deduplication, delta encoding, and data compression take more time compared to uploading the content of the file for the smaller files in size. Also, the data compression on the client-side which is available for every access operation on Dropbox decreases the time required to complete each operation [5,19]. When the size of the file which is going to be uploaded/downloaded is bigger than 4 MB, the file is partitioned into 4 MB blocks (which is also known as chunking) which hashes are represented by blocklists [20].…”

Section: Experiments #2 -The Effect Of File Sizementioning

confidence: 99%

A Performance Evaluation of Dropbox in the light of Personal Cloud Storage Systems

Kabakuş¹,

Kara²

2017

IJCA

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Personal cloud storage services have attracted the attention of users thanks to this great accessibility. Personal cloud storage services allow users to synchronize their local files with the servers in the cloud in order to make them accessible from anywhere, on any device, and at any time thanks to the client applications provided by the vendors. Various experiments are evaluated on Dropbox, one of the most popular personal cloud storage services, in order to reveal how they affect the performances of file operations such as downloading files from the cloud storage, uploading files to the cloud storage, and deleting files from the cloud storage. The experimental results are discussed with revealing the insights about how the file operations are performed on Dropbox. Also, we discuss the several techniques and architectural design principles provided by Dropbox in order to improve the file synchronization performance in terms of required time and stability. Even though we focus on Dropbox, the proposed study gives an idea about the architecture of personal cloud storage services in general and how can they be improved in terms of performance, security, and usability. We conclude the paper with discussing the features to evaluate personal cloud storage services.

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Modeling the Dropbox client behavior

Cited by 17 publications

References 17 publications

Personal Cloud Storage Benchmarks and Comparison

Personal Cloud Storage Benchmarks and Comparison

Dissecting UbuntuOne

A Performance Evaluation of Dropbox in the light of Personal Cloud Storage Systems

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