Analysis of web caching architectures: Hierarchical and distributed caching

Cache cooperation improves the performance of isolated caches, especially f or caches with small cache populations. To make caches cooperate on a large scale and effectively increase the cache population, several caches are us ually federated in caching architectures. In this paper, we discuss and com pare the performance of different caching architectures. In particular, we consider hierarchical and distributed caching. We derive analytical models to study important performance parameters of hierarchical and distributed c aching, i.e., client's perceived latency, bandwidth usage, load in the cach es, and disk space usage. Additionally, we consider a hybrid caching archit ecture that combines hierarchical caching with distributed caching at every level of a caching hierarchy. We evaluate the performance of a hybrid sche me and determine the optimal number of caches that should cooperate at each caching level to minimize client's retrieval latency.