Network dispatcher: a connection router for scalable Internet services
WWW7 Proceedings of the seventh international conference on World Wide Web 7
A scalable and highly available web server
COMPCON '96 Proceedings of the 41st IEEE International Computer Conference
Efficiently serving dynamic data at highly accessed web sites
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
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Caching mechanisms are commonly implemented to improve the user experience as well as the server scalability at popular web sites. With multi-tier, geographically distributed caches, it is often difficult to quantify the benefit provided by each tier of caches. In this paper we present and analyze the design of a web serving architecture that has been successfully used to host a number of recent, popular sporting event web sites with two tiers of caches. Special mechanisms are incorporated in this design that allow us to infer the cache performance at the middle-tier of reverse-proxy caches. Our results demonstrate a very high hit ratio (i.e., around 90%) for the reverse-proxy caches employed in this web serving architecture, which is sustained throughout the day and across all geographical regions being served. This is primarily due to system design mechanisms that allow almost all of the dynamic content to be cached, as well as to a significantly larger locality of reference among the users of sporting event web sites than that found in other web environments. These mechanisms also make it possible for us to separate the true user request patterns at the page level from any additional requests induced by the server architecture and implementation.