Differentiated strategies for replicating Web documents

Replicating Web documents reduces user-perceived delays and wide-area network traffic. Numerous caching and replication protocols have been proposed to manage such replication, while keeping the document copies consistent. We claim however that Web documents have very diverse characteristics, and that no single caching or replication policy can efficiently manage all documents. Instead, we propose that each document is replicated with its most-suited policy. We collected traces on our university’s Web server and conducted simulations to determine the performance such configurations would produce, as opposed to configurations using the same policy for all documents. The results show a significant performance improvement with respect to end-user delays, wide-area network traffic and document consistency. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science