THE INFLUENCE OF GEOGRAPHICAL AND CULTURAL ISSUES ON THE CACHE PROXY SERVER WORKLOAD

A key characteristic of the Internet is its global diffusion, that sho ws a rapid growth of the number of hosts and international links aroun d the world. The diffusion of the Internet has been accompanied by ser ious performance problems, such as long response times, server overloa d and network congestion. Caching has been used as a standard solution to minimize the problem. In this paper, we analyze logs of caching pr oxy servers and show evidence that geographical, cultural and social i ssues have a strong influence on the workload of a proxy server. There fore, the cultural and social context provide relevant information to plan efficient caching proxy architectures. (C) 1998 Published by Else vier Science B.V. All rights reserved.