Adaptive-level memory caches on World Wide Web servers

Owing to the fast growth of World Wide Web (WWW), web traffic has become a major component of Internet traffics. Consequently, the reduction of docume nt retrieval latency on WWW becomes more and more important. The latency ca n be reduced in two ways: reduction of network delay and improvement of web servers' throughput. Our research aims at improving a web server's through put by keeping a memory cache in a web server's address space. In this paper, we focus on the design and implementation of a memory cache scheme. We propose a novel web cache management policy named the adaptive-l evel policy that either caches the whole file content or only a portion of it, according to the file size. The experimental results show three things. First, our memory cache is beneficial since, under our experimental worklo ads, the throughput improvement can achieve 32.7%. Second, our cache manage ment policy is suitable for current web traffic. Third, with the increasing popularity of multimedia files, our policy will outperform others currentl y used in WWW. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.