Abstract
The growth of the World Wide Web (WWW or Web) and its increasing use in all types of business have created bottlenecks that lead to high network and server overload and, eventually, high client latency. Web Caching has become an important topic of research, in the hope that these problems can be addressed by appropriate caching techniques. Conventional wisdom holds that strong cache consistency, with (almost) transactional consistency guarantees, may neither be necessary for Web applications, nor suitable due to its high overhead. However, as business transactions on the Web become more popular, strong consistency will be increasingly necessary. Consequently, it is important to have a comprehensive understanding of the performance behavior of these protocols. The existing studies, unfortunately, are ad hoc and the results cannot be compared across different studies. In this paper we evaluate the performance of different categories of cache consistency algorithms using a standard benchmark: TPC-W, which is the Web commerce benchmark. Our experiments show that we could still enforce strong cache consistency without much overhead, and Invalidation, as an event-driven strong cache consistency algorithm, is most suitable for online e-business. We also evaluate the optimum deployment of caches and find that proxy-side cache has a 30–35% performance advantage over client-side cache with regard to system throughput.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
P. Cao and S. Irani, “Cost-aware WWW proxy caching algorithms,” in Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, Monterey, CA, 1997.
P. Cao and C. Liu, “Maintaining strong cache consistency in the World Wide Web,” IEEE Transactions on Computers47(4), 1998, 445–457.
V. Cate, “Alex – A global file system,” in Proceedings of the USENIX File System Workshop, Ann Arbor, MI, 1992, pp. 1–11.
H. K. Edwards, M. A. Bauer, H. Lutfiyya, Y. Chan, M. Shields, and P. Woo, “A methodology and implementation for analytic modeling in electronic commerce applications,” in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Electronic Commerce, 2001, pp. 148–157.
C. Gray and D. Cheriton, “Leases: An efficient fault-tolerant mechanism for distributed file cache consistency,” in Proceedings of the 12th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 1989, pp. 202–210.
J. Gwertzman and M. Seltzer, “World Wide Web cache consistency,” in Proceedings of the 1996 USENIX Technical Conference, San Diego, CA, 1996, pp. 141–152.
B. Krishnamurthy and C. E. Wills, “Study of piggyback cache validation for proxy caches in the World Wide Web,” in Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems, Monterey, CA, 1997, pp. 1–12.
B. Krishnamurthy and C. E. Wills, “Piggyback Server Invalidation for Proxy Cache Coherency,” Computer Networks and ISDN Systems30(1–7), 1998, 185–193.
M. T. Özsu, K. Voruganti, and R. C. Unrau, “An asynchronous avoidance-based cache consistency algorithm for client caching DBMSs,” in VLDB'98, Proceedings of 24rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, A. Gupta, O. Shmueli, and J. Widom, Eds., August 24–27, 1998, New York City, NY, Morgan Kaufmann, 1998, pp. 440–451.
M. Rabinovich and O. Spatscheck, Web Caching and Replication, Addison-Wesley, 2002.
TPC, “TPC Benchmark W (Web commerce) specification version 1.4,” Technical report, Transaction Processing Performance Council, 2001, http://www.tpc.org/tpcw
D. Wessels, “Intelligent caching for World-Wide Web objects,” in Proc. INET' 95 Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1995.
J. Yin, L. Alvisi, M. Dahlin, and C. Lin, “Using leases to support server-driven consistency in large-scale systems,” in Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, 1998, pp. 285–294.
J. Yin, L. Alvisi, M. Dahlin, and C. Lin, “Volume leases for consistency in large-scale systems,” Knowledge and Data Engineering11(4), 1999, 563–576.
H. Yu, L. Breslau, and S. Shenker, “A scalable Web cache consistency architecture,” in Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM'99, Boston, MA, 1999, pp. 163–174.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Cao, L.Y., Özsu, M.T. Evaluation of Strong Consistency Web Caching Techniques. World Wide Web 5, 95–123 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019697023170
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019697023170