File access patterns in public FTP archives and an index for locality of reference

Abstract

Global filesystems and new file transfer protocols are a great need and challenge in the presence of drastically growing networks. In this paper we present results obtained from an investigation of access to public files which took place over three months. This work visualizes first results on the popularity of public ftp files, on common operations (deletions, updates and insertions) to public file-archives and on encountered filesizes. An index for measuring locality of reference to a resource is also proposed. The results show that most file transfers relate to only a small fraction of the files in an archive and that a considerable part of the operations to public files are updates of files. Further results are presented and interpreted in the paper.