Examining the network traffic of facebook homepage retrieval: An end user perspective

Facebook is one of the most famous social network sites hosting a number of users approaching a billion [1]. Facebook is a cloud-based web site which contains a number of advanced technologies behind the scene. Despite the fact that it is the web site that most users open for all-day and, in some places, all-night long, and its traffic is generally part of all types of networks - wired and wireless, PAN, LAN, MAN, and WAN -, there is virtually no research work or technical paper that report on client's perspective of what happen when users login onto their Facebook homepages. How many and in what order components loaded are, which and how many servers those components loaded are, or how many TCP streams used, are examples of questions which users and network administrators have a little knowledge of. Our work tries to answer the questions by examining every of over 2,000 packets per a single Facebook homepage retrieval using the Wireshark packet capturing software. From the captured packets, we thoroughly examined all objects that Facebook retrieved and categorized them into groups based on the characteristics. Our investigations found that Facebook retrieves these objects from both international and domestic servers, and over a number of parallel TCP streams. The results also showed that the Facebook traffic exhibited a two-spike bursty pattern, regardless of the loading time.