Enhancing the Web's Infrastructure: From Caching to Replication

The World Wide Web and the phrase “traffic jam” have become as linked in the minds of many computer users as are the urban superhighway and “rush hour” to the early morning commuter. Insufficient bandwidth causing high latency are the order of the day. Caching is a standard solution for this type of problem, and it was applied to the Web early on for this reason. The more advanced approaches of replication and applicationlevel naming were introduced over the past two years to further attack the problem. However, these complex methods could easily exacerbate the situation if the implementation is not well designed and the results are not evaluated carefully.