Web Caching and Replication

6.2. Object Size

The first Web property of concern is typical object size. Objects can have drastically different sizes. Icon images, banner advertisements, and small textual objects are typically very small, about 1KByte. Examples of large objects include video and audio files, which can easily reach multiple megabytes. Knowing prevalent object sizes is useful in many design decisions, for example, in deciding on proper storage capacity of a cache or the bandwidth of a network connection. We also use these numbers for "back-of-the-envelope" calculations in this book (see Chapters 9 and 11).

There is a difference between sizes of objects that exist on the Web and sizes of object transfers from servers to clients. The former reflect sizes of distinct ...