THE JAPAN CACHE PROJECT - AN EXPERIMENT ON DOMAIN CACHE

This paper proposes the concept of a domain cache, which is dedicated to handling access to a particular domain name, and reports experiment s in the Japan Cache Project which operates a public cache server for access to JP (Japan) domain web servers. The goal of this project is t o spread information about Japan to North America. This project includ ed some experiments in prefetching information to makes use of less cr owded access times, maintaining the coherence between the cache server and primary servers by primary server refresh, and operating a cache replication server, which keeps the primary server information in the cache and functions not as a proxy server but as an HTTP server. The h igh cache hit ratio obtained suggests that domain caching is an effect ive cache server operation method. However, we could not perform effec tive prefetching because of the difficulty in predicting user accesses . Coherence maintaining and cache replication server mechanisms were c reated. We appeal for cooperation from servers in Japan. (C) 1997 Publ ished by Elsevier Science B.V.