Enabling dynamic content caching for database-driven web sites

Web performance is a key differentiation among content providers. Snafus an d slowdowns at major web sites demonstrate the difficulty that companies fa ce trying to scale to a large amount of web traffic. One solution to this p roblem is to store web content at server-side and edge-caches for fast deli very to the end users. However, for many e-commerce sites, web pages are cr eated dynamically based on the current state of business processes, represe nted in application servers and databases. Since application servers, datab ases, web servers, and caches are independent components, there is no effic ient mechanism to make changes in the database content reflected to the cac hed web pages. As a result, most application servers have to mark dynamical ly generated web pages as non-cacheable. In this paper, we describe the arc hitectural framework of the CachePortal system for enabling dynamic content caching for database-driven e-commerce sites. We describe techniques for i ntelligently invalidating dynamically generated web pages in the caches, th ereby enabling caching of web pages generated based on database contents. W e use some of the most popular components in the industry to illustrate the deployment and applicability of the proposed architecture.