Abstract
This thesis presents a workload characterization study of two scientific Web sites at the University of Calgary based on a four-month period of observation (from January 1, 2015 to April 30, 2015). The Aurora site is a scientific site for auroral researchers, providing auroral images collected from remote cameras deployed in northern Canada. The ISM site is a scientific site providing lecture materials to about 400 undergraduate students in the ASTR 209 course.
Three main observations emerge from our workload characterization study. First, scientific Web sites can generate extremely large volumes of Internet traffic, even when the user community is seemingly small. Second, robot traffic and real-world events can have surprisingly large impacts on network traffic. Third, a large fraction of the observed network traffic is highly redundant, and can be reduced significantly with more efficient networking solutions.
