Web caching with consistent hashing

A key performance measure for the World Wide Web is the speed with which co ntent is served to users. As traffic on the Web increases, users are faced with increasing delays and failures in data delivery. Web caching is one of the key strategies that has been explored to improve performance. An important issue in many caching systems is how to decide what is cached where at any given time. Solutions have included multicast queries and dire ctory schemes. In this paper, we offer a new Web caching strategy based on consistent hash ing. Consistent hashing provides an alternative to multicast and directory schemes, and has several other advantages in load balancing and fault toler ance. Its performance was analyzed theoretically in previous work; in this paper we describe the implementation of a consistent-hashing-based system a nd experiments that support our thesis that it can provide performance impr ovements. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.