A workload characterization study of the 1998 World Cup Web site

This article presents a detailed workload characterization study of the 1998 World Cup Web site. Measurements from this site were collected over a three-month period. During this time the site received 1.35 billion requests, making this the largest Web workload analyzed to date. By examining this extremely busy site and through comparison with existing characterization studies, we are able to determine how Web server workloads are evolving. We find that improvements in the caching architecture of the World Wide Web are changing the workloads of Web servers, but major improvements to that architecture are still necessary. In particular, we uncover evidence that a better consistency mechanism is required for World Wide Web caches.