Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Alternative Architectures and Protocols for Providing Strong Consistency in Dynamic Web Applications

  • Published:
World Wide Web Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Dynamic Web applications have gained a great deal of popularity. Improving the performance of these applications has recently attracted the attention of many researchers. One of the most important techniques proposed for this purpose is caching, which can be done at different locations and within different stages of the process of generating a dynamic Web page. Most of the caching schemes proposed in literature are lenient about the issue of consistency; they assume that users can tolerate receiving stale data. However, an important class of dynamic Web applications are those in which users always expect to get the freshest data available. Any caching scheme has to incur a significant overhead to be able to provide this level of consistency (i.e., strong consistency); the overhead may be so much that it neutralizes the benefits of caching. In this paper, three alternative architectures are investigated for dynamic Web applications that require strong consistency. A proxy caching scheme is designed and implemented, which performs caching at the level of database queries. This caching system is used in one of the alternative architectures. The performance experiments show that, despite the high overhead of providing strong consistency in database caching, this technique can improve the performance of dynamic Web applications, especially when there is a long network latency between clients and the (origin) server.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Altinel, M., Bornhovd, C., Krishnamurthy, S., Mohan, C., Pirahesh, H., Reinwald, B.: Cache tables: paving the way for an adaptive database cache. In: Proc. 29th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, pp. 718–729 (2003)

  2. Altinel, M., Luo, Q., Krishnamurthy, S., Mohan, C., Pirahesh, H., Lindsay, B.G., Woo, H., Brown, L.: Dbcache: database caching for web application servers. In: Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, p. 612 (2002)

  3. Amza, C.: Transparent caching and consistency in dynamic content web sites (draft paper). Available at http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/amza/papers/osdi.ps

  4. Amza, C.: Conflict-aware scheduling for dynamic content applications. PhD thesis, Department of Computer Science, Rice University, Houston, Texas (2003)

  5. Anton, J., Jacobs, L., Liu, X., Parker, J., Zeng, Z., Zhong, T.: Web caching for database applications with oracle web cache. In: Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, pp. 594–599 (2002)

  6. Bornhvd, C., Altinel, M., Mohan, C., Pirahesh, H., Reinwald, B.: Adaptive database caching with DBCache. Data Eng. 27(2), 11–18 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Brabrand, C. Møller, A., Olesen, S., Schwartzbach, M.: Language-based caching of dynamically generated HTML. World Wide Web J. 5(4), 305–323 (2002), Kluwer.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Candan, K., Li, W., Luo, Q., Hsiung, W., Agrawal, D.: Enabling dynamic content caching for database-driven web sites. In: Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, pp. 532–543 (2001)

  9. Cao, L., Özsu, M.T.: Evaluation of strong web caching techniques. World Wide Web J. 5(2), 95–123 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Cao, P., Zhang, J., Beach, K.: Active cache: caching dynamic contents on the web. In: Proc. IFIP International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms and Open Distributed Processing (Middleware ‘98), pp. 373–388 (1998)

  11. Challenger, J., Dantzig, P., Iyengar, A.: A scalable system for consistently caching dynamic web data. In: Proc. 18th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (INFOCOM ‘99), pp. 294–303. New York, (1999)

  12. Challenger, J., Iyengar, A., Witting, K., Ferstat, C., Reed, P.: A publishing system for efficiently creating dynamic web content. In: Proc. the INFOCOM Conference, pp. 844–853 (2000)

  13. Datta, A., Dutta, K., Thomas, H., VanderMeer, D., Suresha, Ramamritham, K.: Proxy-based acceleration of dynamically generated content on the world wide web: an approach and implementation. In: Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, pp. 97–108 (2002)

  14. Douglis, F., Haro, A., Rabinovich, M.: Hpp: Html macro-preprocessing to support dynamic document caching. In: USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, pp. 83–94 (1997)

  15. Duvvuri, V., Shenoy, P., Tewari, R.: Adaptive leases: a strong consistency mechanism for the world wide web. In: Proc. INFOCOM Conference, pp. 834–843. Tel Aviv, Israel, March (2000)

  16. Fei, Z.: A novel approach to managing consistency in content distribution networks. In: Proc. 6th Workshop on Web Caching and Content Distribution, pp. 71–86. Boston, Massachusetts, June (2001)

  17. Florescu, D., Levy, A., Suciu, D., Yagoub, K.: Optimization of run-time management of data intensive web sites. In: Proc. 25th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, pp. 627–638. Edinburgh, Scotland, September (1999)

  18. Gray, C., Cheriton, D.: Leases: an efficient fault tolerant mechanism for distributed le cache consistency. In: Proc. 12th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 202–210 (1989)

  19. Holmedahl, V., Smith, B., Yang, T.: Cooperative caching of dynamic content on a distributed web server. Technical Report TRCS98-12, Computer Science Department, University of California Santa Barbara (1998)

  20. IBM DB2 Universal Database: http://www-3.ibm.com/software/data/db2/

  21. Inktomi Corporation: http://www.inktomi.com/products/network/traffic

  22. Iyengar, A., Challenger, J.: Improving web server performance by caching dynamic data. In: USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, pp. 49–60 (1997)

  23. Java TPC-W Implementation Distribution: http://www.ece.wisc.edu/~pharm/tpcw.shtml

  24. Keller, A.M., Basu, J.: A predicate-based caching scheme for client-server database architectures. The VLDB J. 5(1), 35–47 (1996)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Labrinidis, A., Roussopoulos, N.: Webview materialization. In: Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, pp. 367–378 (2000)

  26. Liu, C., Cao, P.: Maintaining strong cache consistency in the world-wide web. In: Proc. 17th Int. Conf. on Distributed Computing Systems, pp. 12–21 (1997)

  27. Luo, Q., Naughton, J.: Form-based proxy caching for database-backed web sites. In: Proc. 27th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, pp. 191–200 (2001)

  28. Luo, Q., Krishnamurthy, S., Mohan, C., Pirahesh, H., Woo, H., Lindsay, B., Naughton, J.: Middle-tier database caching for e-business. In: Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, pp. 600–611 (2002)

  29. Ninan, A., Kulkarni, P., Shenoy, P., Ramamritham, K., Tewari, R.: Cooperative leases: scalable consistency maintenance in content distribution networks. In: Proc. 11th Int. World Wide Web Conference, pp. 1–12 (2002)

  30. Oracle Corp: Oracle 9i application server: Database cache, 2001

  31. Rabinovich, M., Spatscheck, O.: Web Caching and Replication. Addison-Wesley (2002)

  32. Rajamani, K., Cox, A.: A simple and effective caching scheme for dynamic content. Technical Report, CS Dept., Rice University, September (2000)

  33. The Times Ten Team: High performance and scalability through application-tier in memory data management. In: Proc. 26th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, pp. 677–680 (2000)

  34. Tomcat Servlet/JSP Container: http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/

  35. Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC): TPC Benchmark W (Web Commerce) specification, http://www.tpc.org/tpcw/default.asp (2002)

  36. Yagoub, K., Florescu, D., Issarny, V., Valduriez, P.: Caching strategies for dataintensive web sites. In: Proc. 26th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, pp. 188–199 (2000)

  37. Yin, J., Alvisi, L., Dahlin, M., Lin, C.: Volume leases for consistency in large-scale systems. Knowl. Data Eng. 11(4), 563–576 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Yu, H., Breslau, L., Shenker, S.: A scalable web cache consistency architecture. In: Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, pp. 163–174 (1999)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue W., Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1, Canada

    M. Hossein Sheikh Attar & M. Tamer Özsu

Authors
  1. M. Hossein Sheikh Attar
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. M. Tamer Özsu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to M. Tamer Özsu.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Hossein Sheikh Attar, M., Tamer Özsu, M. Alternative Architectures and Protocols for Providing Strong Consistency in Dynamic Web Applications. World Wide Web 9, 215–251 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-006-8563-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-006-8563-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation