- From: Balachander Krishnamurthy <bala@research.att.com>
- Date: Tue, 03 Aug 1999 14:52:07 -0400
- To: http-wg@hplb.hpl.hp.com, wrec@cs.utk.edu
[abstract, observations, and url of a paper that might be of interest. apologies for those of you who get duplicate copies] abstract With the recent (draft) standardization of the HTTP/1.1 protocol on the Web, it is natural to ask what percentage of popular Web sites speak HTTP/1.1 and how {\it compliant} are these so-called HTTP/1.1 servers. We attempt to answer these questions through a series of experiments based on the protocol standard. The tests are run on a comprehensive list of popular Web sites to which a good fraction of the Web traffic is directed. Our experiments were conducted on a global extensible testing infrastructure that we built to answer the above questions. The same infrastructure will be used to answer questions like the percentage of the traffic flow that is end-to-end HTTP/1.1. Our results show reasons for concern on the state of HTTP/1.1 protocol compliancy and the subset of features actually available to end users. some interesting observations: we tested over 500 'popular' soi disant HTTP/1.1 sites and only about 60% were unconditionally compliant on 3 basic tests (GET, HEAD, dealing with absence of Host header). 7% failed all three tests. 70% of the sites handled persistent connections and nearly that many pipelining. Half of the sites handled range requests. 20% of sites didn't support any of persistent connections/pipelining/range. 30% of sites passed all 6 tests. if u want to look at the paper (jointly written with martin arlitt of hp-labs) please see http://www.research.att.com/~bala/papers/procow-1.ps.gz cheers, bala balachander krishnamurthy www.research.att.com/~bala/papers
Received on Tuesday, 3 August 1999 21:55:18 UTC