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AjaxTracker: A Tool for High Fidelity Characterization of Ajax Applications

Interactive web applications powered by new technologies such as Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) have undeniably altered the course of the Web. Despite their popularity, the associated machinery for characterization, measurement, and monitoring of these AJAX-based applications has lagged behind significantly. Part of the problem is that there exists no systematic way to generate AJAX workloads and observe their network behavior today. This paper focuses on addressing this issue by developing a tool, called AjaxTracker, that automatically mimics a human interaction with an AJAX-powered web site and collects associated network traces. These traces can further be post-processed to understand various characteristics of AJAX applications. Given the completely automated nature of our tool, we can study several popular AJAX Web services, such as mail and maps applications from popular providers, both across time as well as space (different vantage points). Our results using a month-long study revealed that AJAX application signatures exhibit remarkable similarity along several features across days. Somewhat surprisingly, there seems to be a lot of similarity across applications that belong to the same category (such as maps, mail) but different providers (such as Google, Yahoo).