MAIN MEMORY CACHING OF WEB DOCUMENTS

An increasing amount of information is currently becoming available th rough World Wide Web servers. Document requests to popular Web servers arrive every few tens of milliseconds at peak rate. To reduce the ove rhead imposed by frequent document requests, we propose the notion of caching a World Wide Web server's documents in its main memory (which we call Main Memory Web Caching). We show that even a small amount of main memory (512 Kbytes) that is used as a document cache, is enough t o hold more than 60% of the documents requested. We also show that tra ditional file system cache management methods are inappropriate for ma naging Main Memory Web caches, and may result in poor performance. Bas ed on trace-driven simulations of several server traces we quantify ou r claims, and propose a new cache management that dynamically adjusts itself to the clients' request pattern and cache size. We show that ou r policy is robust over a variety of parameters and results is better overall performance.