Characterization of workload and resource consumption for an online travel and booking site

Online travel and ticket booking is one of the top E-Commerce industries. As they present a mix of products: flights, hotels, tickets, restaurants, activities and vacational packages, they rely on a wide range of technologies to support them: Javascript, AJAX, XML, B2B Web services, Caching, Search Algorithms and Affiliation; resulting in a very rich and heterogeneous workload. Moreover, visits to travel sites present a great variability depending on time of the day, season, promotions, events, and linking; creating bursty traffic, making capacity planning a challenge. It is therefore of great importance to understand how users and crawlers interact on travel sites and their effect on server resources, for devising cost effective infrastructures and improving the Quality of Service for users. In this paper we present a detailed workload and resource consumption characterization of the web site of a top national Online Travel Agency. Characterization is performed on server logs, including both HTTP data and resource consumption of the requests, as well as the server load status during the execution. From the dataset we characterize user sessions, their patterns and how response time is affected as load on Web servers increases. We provide a fine grain analysis by performing experiments differentiating: types of request, time of the day, products, and resource requirements for each. Results show that the workload is bursty, as expected, that exhibit different properties between day and night traffic in terms of request type mix, that user session length cover a wide range of durations, which response time grows proportionally to server load, and that response time of external data providers also increase on peak hours, amongst other results. Such results can be useful for optimizing infrastructure costs, improving QoS for users, and development of realistic workload generators for similar applications.