research-article

Understanding website complexity: measurements, metrics, and implications

Authors:

Michael Butkiewicz,

Harsha V. Madhyastha,

Vyas SekarAuthors Info & Claims

IMC '11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference

Pages 313 - 328

https://doi.org/10.1145/2068816.2068846

Published: 02 November 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Over the years, the web has evolved from simple text content from one server to a complex ecosystem with different types of content from servers spread across several administrative domains. There is anecdotal evidence of users being frustrated with high page load times or when obscure scripts cause their browser windows to freeze. Because page load times are known to directly impact user satisfaction, providers would like to understand if and how the complexity of their websites affects the user experience.

While there is an extensive literature on measuring web graphs, website popularity, and the nature of web traffic, there has been little work in understanding how complex individual websites are, and how this complexity impacts the clients' experience. This paper is a first step to address this gap. To this end, we identify a set of metrics to characterize the complexity of websites both at a content-level (e.g., number and size of images) and service-level (e.g., number of servers/origins).

We find that the distributions of these metrics are largely independent of a website's popularity rank. However, some categories (e.g., News) are more complex than others. More than 60% of websites have content from at least 5 non-origin sources and these contribute more than 35% of the bytes downloaded. In addition, we analyze which metrics are most critical for predicting page render and load times and find that the number of objects requested is the most important factor. With respect to variability in load times, however, we find that the number of servers is the best indicator.

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Kumar RCarisimo ERiva LBuzzone MBustamante FQazi IBeiró MVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)Of Choices and Control - A Comparative Analysis of Government HostingProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3688447(462-479)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3688447
Zhang XJin SHe YHassan AMao ZQian FZhang ZChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(2024)QUIC is not Quick Enough over Fast InternetProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645323(2713-2722)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
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Index Terms

Understanding website complexity: measurements, metrics, and implications
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development process management
      1. Software development methods
    2. Software verification and validation
      1. Empirical software validation
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Software functional properties
      1. Formal methods

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cover image ACM Conferences

IMC '11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference

November 2011

612 pages

ISBN:9781450310130

DOI:10.1145/2068816

Program Chairs:
Patrick Thiran
EPFL, Switzerland
,
Walter Willinger
AT&T Labs-Research, USA

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 November 2011

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November 2 - 4, 2011

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Cited By

Madeley JPhokeer ASiddiqui ABenson T(2024)Towards Measuring Content LocalityProceedings of the 2024 Applied Networking Research Workshop10.1145/3673422.3674895(88-90)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3673422.3674895
Kumar RCarisimo ERiva LBuzzone MBustamante FQazi IBeiró MVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)Of Choices and Control - A Comparative Analysis of Government HostingProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3688447(462-479)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3688447
Zhang XJin SHe YHassan AMao ZQian FZhang ZChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(2024)QUIC is not Quick Enough over Fast InternetProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645323(2713-2722)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3645323
Misumi MTariki MKamiyama N(2024)Cache Control Method for Multiple Web Cache Servers Based on Co-Occurrence Degree2024 IEEE 21st Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC)10.1109/CCNC51664.2024.10454749(31-36)Online publication date: 6-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/CCNC51664.2024.10454749
Ardi CCalder MMontpetit MLeivadeas AUhlig SJaved M(2023)The Prevalence of Single Sign-On on the Web: Towards the Next Generation of Web Content MeasurementProceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3618257.3624841(124-130)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
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Naseer UBenson T(2023)JS Capsules: A Framework for Capturing Fine-grained JavaScript Memory Measurements for the Mobile Web.ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3606376.359354851:1(53-54)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2023
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Naseer UBenson T(2023)JS Capsules: A Framework for Capturing Fine-grained JavaScript Memory Measurements for the Mobile WebProceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems10.1145/35793277:1(1-26)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2023
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Naseer UBenson TSmirni EAvrachenkov KGill PUrgaonkar B(2023)JS Capsules: A Framework for Capturing Fine-grained JavaScript Memory Measurements for the Mobile Web.Abstract Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems10.1145/3578338.3593548(53-54)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
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