HTTPflow: An Introduction

Internet performance measurement is becoming increasingly important. As more computers join this global network, downloads, gaming, online presentations and even simple messaging may all experience considerable lag times and communication errors. The current work breaks off the piece of the bigger problem and attempts to take a peek into the performance of the HTTP protocol, the driving force behind Web browsing. Being able to analyze HTTP streams for performance can provide a glimpse into this problem for the network under investigation. This paper introduces HTTPflow which captures packets and extracts HTTP-specific information on a per-TCP flow basis. HTTPflow examines all port 80 traffic and extracts HTTP headers and timings for requests and responses.

Technical Report LU-CSE-02-003, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Lehigh University, May 2002.

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