A light-weight, collaborative temporary file system for clustered Web servers
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing - Special issue: 18th International parallel and distributed processing symposium
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In this technical report we propose a new method for improving the average response time of Web servers by cooperatively caching the results of requests for dynamic content. The work is motivated by our recent study of access logs from the Alexandria Digital Library server at UCSB, which demonstrates that approximately a 30 percent decrease in average response time could be achieved by caching dynamically generated content. We have developed a distributed Web server called Swala, in which the nodes cooperatively cache the results of CGI requests. We use a two-level cache table consistency protocol and a replicated global cache directory to maximize the system performance and minimize overhead in responding to dynamic Web requests. Our experiments show that the single-node performance of Swala without caching is comparable to the Netscape Enterprise server, that considerable speedups are obtained using caching, and that the cache hit rate is substantially higher with cooperative cache than with standalone cache.