Web Caching and Replication

Introduction As the Internet has become an essential part of everyday life, hundreds of millions of users now connect to the Internet. At the same time, more resource-hungry and performance-sensitive applications have emerged. Expectations of scalability and performance have made caching and replication common features of the infrastructure of the Web. By directing the workload away from possibly overloaded origin Web servers, Web caching and replication address Web performance and scalability from the client side and the server side, respectively. Caching stores a copy of data close to the data consumer (e.g., in a Web browser) to allow faster data access than if the content had to be retrieved from the origin server. Replication, on the other hand, creates and maintains distributed copies of content under the control of content providers. This is helpful because client requests can then be sent to the nearest and least-busy server. Moreover, value-added services, such as virus checking, Web page language translation, and automatic content adaptation for small handheld devices can be developed upon this platform. This book, by two leading researchers at AT&T Labs, Michael Rabinovich and Oliver Spatscheck, presents the state-of-the-art in Web caching and replication from and for both industry and academic research.