Active Cache: Caching Dynamic Contents on the Web
Pei Cao, Jin Zhang and Kevin Beach
Computer Sciences Department,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
cao@cs.wisc.edu
The HTML version of the paper is here.
The postscript that appears in the Proceedings of Middleware'98 is
here.
Abstract
Dynamic documents constitute an increasing
percentage of contents on the Web, and caching dynamic documents
becomes an increasingly important issue that affects the
scalability of the Web. In this paper, we propose the Active Cache scheme
to support caching of dynamic contents at Web proxies. The scheme
allows servers to supply cache applets to be attached with
documents, and requires proxies to invoke cache applets upon cache hits
to furnish the necessary processing without contacting the server. We
describe the protocol, interface and security mechanisms of the Active
Cache scheme, and illustrate its use via several examples. Through
prototype implementation and performance measurements, we show that
Active Cache is a feasible scheme that can result in significant network
bandwidth savings at the expense of moderate CPU costs.