An Efficient Design for Server-side Caching

Abstract

The World Wide Web (WWW) has been a very successful distributed system that can be used to share information with people on the Internet. The exponential growth of the Internet usage has led many new problems to be solved. Caching objects has been a very effective way to reduce the delay of repeatedly accessing web pages. However, server-side scripts generating web page on-the-fly are used extensively by web page designers in recent years. The web pages generated dynamically make the caching in client useless. In this paper, an efficient design for server-side caching is proposed. The proposed design improves the existing server-side caching systems by using rewrite engine supported by apache web server and novel cache management. Simple rewrite rules run on the web server totally remove the overhead of validation process for checking the freshness of web pages. Cache manager that executes asynchronously removes the cache garbage collection from the critical path of accessing a web page. The results from the analysis and the performance measurements show that the proposed caching system has shorter response time and higher throughput than the traditional dynamic server-side scripts and the existing caching systems.