Analysis of enterprise media server workloads: Access patterns, locality, content evolution, and rates of change

Understanding the nature of media server workloads is crucial to properly designing and provisioning current and future media services. The main issue we address in this paper is the workload analysis of today's enterprise media servers. This analysis aims to establish a set of properties specific to the enterprise media server workloads and to compare them to well-known related observations about the web server workloads. We partition the media workload properties in two groups: static and temporal. While the static properties provide more traditional and general characteristics of the underlying media fileset and quantitative properties of client accesses to those files (independent of the access time), the temporal properties reflect the dynamics and evolution of accesses to the media content over time. We propose two new metrics characterizing the temporal properties: 1) the new files impact metric characterizing the site evolution due to new content and 2) the life span metric reflecting the rates of change in accesses to the newly introduced files. We illustrate these new metrics with the analysis of two different enterprise media server workloads collected over a significant period of time.