Evaluation of Delivery Techniques for Dynamic Web Content (Extended Version)

Abstract

The portion of web traffic attributed to dynamic web content is substantial and continues to grow as users expect more personalization and tailored information. Unfortunately, dynamic content is costly to generate. Moreover, traditional web caching schemes are not very effective for dynamically-created pages. In this paper we study two new acceleration techniques for dynamic content. The first technique is ESI, proposed by a consortium of companies including Akamai and Oracle. ESI enables assembly of dynamic web pages from page fragments on specialized edge servers. The second technique, Class-Based Delta Encoding, presented in [1], encodes pages to be delivered as deltas of previously delivered base pages. To evaluate these schemes, we present a model for the construction of dynamic web pages. We use simulation to explore how system, page-construction and algorithm parameters affect the performance of dynamic content techniques, and we present a detailed comparison of ESI and delta encoding in two representative scenarios.