Information Research: An International Electronic Journal (Jan 2000)
Maintaining Web Cache Coherency
Abstract
Document coherency is a challenging problem for Web caching. Once the documents are cached throughout the Internet, it is often difficult to keep them coherent with the origin document without generating a new traffic that could increase the traffic on the international backbone and overload the popular servers. Several solutions have been proposed to solve this problem, among them two categories have been widely discussed: the strong document coherency and the weak document coherency. The cost and the efficiency of the two categories are still a controversial issue, while in some studies the strong coherency is far too expensive to be used in the Web context, in other studies it could be maintained at a low cost. The accuracy of these analysis is depending very much on how the document updating process is approximated. In this study, we compare some of the coherence methods proposed for Web caching. Among other points, we study the side effects of these methods on the Internet traffic. The ultimate goal is to study the cache behavior under several conditions, which will cover some of the factors that play an important role in the Web cache performance evaluation and quantify their impact on the simulation accuracy. The results presented in this study show indeed some differences in the outcome of the simulation of a Web cache depending on the workload being used, and the probability distribution used to approximate updates on the cached documents. Each experiment shows two case studies that outline the impact of the considered parameter on the performance of the cache.
