Theoretical performance analysis of mirroring World Wide Web sites

Popular World Wide Web sites can often cause congestion hot spots in the network, resulting in degradation of performance. Typically, such sites are mirrored in order to alleviate bottlenecks. This presents users of these sites with a choice of where to access their documents. Using a theoretical Web access delay model, a performance analysis is carried out which shows the effects of mirror location and communication facility speed. The analysis shows the conflict of interest between the network operator trying to optimise aggregate data rates and that of the users trying to maximise their own individual data rates. The results reflect upon the load balancing policies for optimal network performance.