MEMORY-BASED ARCHITECTURE FOR DISTRIBUTED WWW CACHING PROXY

In networks with heavy WWW traffic, the disk I/O performance can becom e a bottleneck for caching proxies. To solve this problem, we propose a memory-based architecture for WWW caching proxies. The features of t he proposed architecture are (1) a cache contents control that retriev es only frequently accessed WWW pages, and (2) an automatic distributi on mechanism that enables efficient cache space sharing among multiple caching proxies. A statistical analysis shows that our approach reduc es the required cache space. It consumes only 1/10 the cache space of current typical proxies while retaining the same cache hit rate. The r educed cache space enables the use of fast DRAMs in the caching proxie s, and solves the disk I/O problem. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Sci ence B.V. All rights reserved.