A use case of Content Delivery Network raw logfile analysis

TL;DR

This paper analyzes raw CDN log files to understand user access patterns, system performance, and potential improvements, bridging the gap between theoretical models and industrial practices.

Contribution

It provides a detailed case study of CDN infrastructure and performance analysis using raw logs, offering insights into real-world CDN operations.

Findings

User access patterns identified from logs

Sources of requests analyzed for optimization

System performance metrics derived

Abstract

The growth of video streaming has stretched the Internet to its limitation. In other words, the Internet was originally devised to connect a limited number of computers so that they can share network resources, so the Internet cannot handle a large amount of traffic at a time, which leads to network congestion. To overcome this, CDNs are built on top of the Internet as an overlay to efficiently store and swiftly disseminate contents to users by placing many servers and data centers around the globe. The topic of CDNs has been extensively studied in the last several decades. However, there is still a certain gap between theories in academia and current technologies in industry. In this paper, we take a close look at the design, implementation, solution, and performance of a CDN system by analyzing its raw log files. Specifically, its infrastructure and system design are first presented, and then we conduct a trace-based study to understand user access patterns, the sources of requests, system performance, and how such information can be used to improve the whole CDN system.