Static Caching of Web Servers

With the increasing popularity of the World Wide Web, the amount of information available and the use of Web servers are growing exponentially. As a consequence, the number of requests to popular Web servers increases exponentially as well. In order to reduce the overhead induced by frequent requests to the same documents, server caching, also referred to as main memory caching, has been proposed and implemented. In this work, we propose a static caching mechanism which consists in updating the contents of the cache periodically and, at the update time, brings in the cache only the most requested documents in the previous time interval. This caching policy has a lower management overhead. Under some statistical assumptions we show that static caching has the highest hit rate. We also provide empirical comparison results obtained by trace-driven simulations. It turns out that static caching is more eecient in terms of hit rate than those analyzed in the literature.