Studying the impact of more complete server information on Web caching

Caching of objects in the World Wide Web is a widely used technique to redu ce end-user latencies, network and server load. Currently deployed heuristi c-based approaches to caching result in a large number of unnecessary valid ations, and prior results show potential for better reuse of cached Web con tent. This work studies a more deterministic approach to caching of Web obj ects. The idea is to view HTML pages as containers, holding distinct object s with heterogeneous type and change characteristics. Servers compile infor mation about relationships between containers and embedded objects and pigg yback it onto existing request/response traffic. Our results indicate that these techniques significantly improve existing cache management strategies . (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.