Web Caching and Its Applications

The last decade has seen a tremendous growth in the usage of the World Wide Web. The Web has grown so fast that it seems to be becoming an unusable and slow behemoth. Web caching is one way to tame and make this behemoth a friendly and useful giant. The key idea in Web caching is to cache frequently accessed content so that it may be used profitably later. This book focuses entirely on Web caching techniques. Much of the material in this book is very relevant for those interested in understanding the wide gamut of Web caching research. It will be helpful for those interested in making use of the power of the Web in a more profitable way. Audience and purpose of this book This book presents key concepts in Web caching and is meant to be suited for a wide variety of readers including advanced undergraduate and graduate students‚ programmers‚ network administrators‚ researchers‚ teachers‚ techn- ogists and Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

Architectural Aspects.- Various Flavors of Web Caching.- Comparing Cache Deployment Options.- Caching Architectures.- Caching Dynamic Data.- Aspects Requiring Co-Ordination.- Inter-Cache Communication.- Routing Requests to Caches.- Cache Replacement Algorithms.- Cache Coherency.- Aspects Related to Traffic.- Web Traffic Characteristics.- Forecasting Patterns of Access.- Complementary Techniques.- Prefetching.- Load Balancing.- Replication.- Practical Aspects.- Fault Tolerance in Caching Systems.- Caching for Libraries, ISPs and Others.- Building Cache Friendly Web Sites.- Caching at the Global Level.- Aspects Related to Performance.- Measuring Performance.- Zipf’s Law and Its Role in Web Caching.- References.