Report ID
1998-12
Report Authors
Vegard Holmedahl, Ben Smith, and Tao Yang
Report Date
Abstract
In this technical report we propose a new method for improving the averageresponse time of Web servers by cooperatively caching the results of requestsfor dynamic content. The work is motivated by our recent study of access logsfrom the Alexandria Digital Library server at UCSB, which demonstrates thatapproximately a 30 percent decrease in average response time could be achievedby caching dynamically generated content. We have developed a distributed Webserver called Swala, in which the nodes cooperatively cache the results of CGIrequests. We use a two-level cache table consistency protocol and a replicatedglobal cache directory to maximize the system performance and minimize overheadin responding to dynamic Web requests. Our experiments show that thesingle-node performance of Swala without caching is comparable to the NetscapeEnterprise server, that considerable speedups are obtained using caching, andthat the cache hit rate is substantially higher with cooperative cache thanwith standalone cache.
Document
1998-12.ps404.71 KB