Differentiated strategies for replicating Web documents

Replicating Web documents reduces user-perceived delays and wide-area netwo rk traffic. Numerous caching and replication protocols have been proposed t o manage such replication while keeping the document copies consistent. We claim, however, that no single caching or replication policy can efficientl y manage all documents. Instead, we propose that each document be replicate d with a policy specifically tailored to it. We have collected traces on ou r university's Web server and conducted simulations to determine the perfor mance such tailored policies would produce, as opposed to using the same po licy for all documents. The results show a significant performance improvem ent with respect to end-user delays, wide-area network traffic and document consistency. We also present how these results can be used to build adapti ve replicated Web documents, capable of automatically selecting the policy that best suits them. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.