Method-based caching in multi-tiered server applications

Abstract In recent years, application server technology has become very popular for building complex but mission-critical systems such as Web-based E-Commerce applications. However, the resulting solutions tend to suffer from serious performance and scalability bottlenecks, because of their distributed nature and their various software layers. This paper deals with the problem by presenting an approach about transparently caching results of a service interface\u27s read-only methods on the client side. Cache consistency is provided by a descriptive cache invalidation model which may be specified by an application programmer. As the cache layer is transparent to the server as well as to the client code, it can be integrated with relatively low effort even in systems that have already been implemented. Experimental results show that the approach is very effective in improving a server\u27s response times and its transactional throughput. Roughly speaking, the overhead for cache maintenance is small when compared to the cost for method invocations on the server side. The cache\u27s performance improvements are dominated by the fraction of read method invocations and the cache hit rate. Our experiments are based on a realistic E-commerce Web site scenario and site user behaviour is emulated in an authentic way. By inserting our cache, the maximum user request throughput of the web application could be more than doubled while its response time (such as perceived by a web client) was kept at a very low level. Moreover, the cache can be smoothly integrated with traditional caching strategies acting on other system tiers (e.g. caching of dynamic Web pages on a Web server). The presented approach as well as the related implementation are not restricted to application server scenarios but may be applied to any kind of interface-based software layers

A Distributed Caching System in DTNs

Many popular services in the Internet are based on a client-server architecture. This is not an optimal model in some cases. Especially, where the server becomes difficult to reach due to link or path failures or traffic overloadings. This Master's thesis presents a design, implementation and evaluation of a distributed caching system for optimization of content retrieval in Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs). The presented solution proposes pushing the content closer to the requesting clients, by caching it in alternative locations on the path between client and server. In this case, the clients are able to retrieve the content with lower latency and fewer network resource consumption. The approach is motivated by the decreasing price of storage in caches. The first part of the thesis introduces the research problem on a general basis, and a literature overview is given to present the current research in the field of Web caching, proactive caching in Content Distribution Networks and caching in DTN environments. A design of the distributed caching system is then presented. Focus is to design a node that can participate in content caching. Theoretical approach is taken to motivate network topologies, routing protocols and distributions of the queries for simulations. The experimental part of the thesis discusses the results of the simulations performed to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed solution. As a result, the presented distributed caching system is shown to increase the overall retrieval performance, as well as reduce the latency for obtaining the responses. In particular, caching policies that aggressively cache items always give the best results, however, with increasing storage costs. Moreover, the distribution of the queried items has a major impact on retrieval performance

MADServer: An Architecture for Opportunistic Mobile Advanced Delivery

Rapid increases in cellular data traffic demand creative alternative delivery vectors for data. Despite the conceptual attractiveness of mobile data offloading, no concrete web server architectures integrate intelligent offloading in a production-ready and easily deployable manner without relying on vast infrastructural changes to carriers’ networks. Delay-tolerant networking technology offers the means to do just this. We introduce MADServer, a novel DTN-based architecture for mobile data offloading that splits web con- tent among multiple independent delivery vectors based on user and data context. It enables intelligent data offload- ing, caching, and querying solutions which can be incorporated in a manner that still satisfies user expectations for timely delivery. At the same time, it allows for users who have poor or expensive connections to the cellular network to leverage multi-hop opportunistic routing to send and receive data. We also present a preliminary implementation of MADServer and provide real-world performance evaluations

CFTP: a caching FTP server

By analyzing the log files generated by the UK National Web Cache and by a number of origin FTP sites we provide evidence that an FTP proxy cache with knowledge of local (national) mirror sites could significantly reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred across already overused networks. We then describe the design and implementation of CFTP, a caching FTP server, and report on its usage over the first 10 months of its deployment. Finally we discuss a number of ways in which the software could be further enhanced to improve both its efficiency and its usability

An Infrastructure for the Dynamic Distribution of Web Applications and Services

This paper presents the design and implementation of an infrastructure that enables any Web application, regardless of its current state, to be stopped and uninstalled from a particular server, transferred to a new server, then installed, loaded, and resumed, with all these events occurring "on the fly" and totally transparent to clients. Such functionalities allow entire applications to fluidly move from server to server, reducing the overhead required to administer the system, and increasing its performance in a number of ways: (1) Dynamic replication of new instances of applications to several servers to raise throughput for scalability purposes, (2) Moving applications to servers to achieve load balancing or other resource management goals, (3) Caching entire applications on servers located closer to clients.National Science Foundation (9986397

WebWave: Globally Load Balanced Fully Distributed Caching of Hot Published Documents

Document publication service over such a large network as the Internet challenges us to harness available server and network resources to meet fast growing demand. In this paper, we show that large-scale dynamic caching can be employed to globally minimize server idle time, and hence maximize the aggregate server throughput of the whole service. To be efficient, scalable and robust, a successful caching mechanism must have three properties: (1) maximize the global throughput of the system, (2) find cache copies without recourse to a directory service, or to a discovery protocol, and (3) be completely distributed in the sense of operating only on the basis of local information. In this paper, we develop a precise definition, which we call tree load-balance (TLB), of what it means for a mechanism to satisfy these three goals. We present an algorithm that computes TLB off-line, and a distributed protocol that induces a load distribution that converges quickly to a TLB one. Both algorithms place cache copies of immutable documents, on the routing tree that connects the cached document's home server to its clients, thus enabling requests to stumble on cache copies en route to the home server.Harvard University; The Saudi Cultural Mission to the U.S.A