Adaptive-level memory caches on World Wide Web servers

Owing to the fast growth of World Wide Web (WWW), web traffic has become a major component of Internet traffics. Consequently, the reduction of document retrieval latency on WWW becomes more and more important. The latency can be reduced in two ways: reduction of network delay and improvement of web servers' throughput. Our research aims at improving a web server's throughput by keeping a memory cache in a web server's address space. In this paper, we focus on the design and implementation of a memory cache scheme. We propose a novel web cache management policy named the adaptive-level policy that either caches the whole file content or only a portion of it, according to the file size. The experimental results show three things. First, our memory cache is beneficial since, under our experimental workloads, the throughput improvement can achieve 32.7%. Second, our cache management policy is suitable for current web traffic. Third, with the increasing popularity of multimedia files, our policy will outperform others currently used in WWW. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.