University of Houston
Department of Computer Science
In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science
Qiaomei Huang
will defend her thesis
A Performance Study of Web Caching on a Local Area Network
Abstract
Web caching has been recognized as one of the most important techniques to reduce Internet bandwidth consumption caused by the exponential growth of the World Wide Web. The traditional approach of using dedicated hardware for centralized web caching on a LAN is expensive in terms of infrastructure and administrative costs. Large institution networks often employ a cluster of machines for web caching. A growth in user population causes scalability issues, leading to a need for hardware upgrades. Another drawback is that a dedicated web cache may represent a single point of failure. This thesis explores the idea of distributed LAN caching via software only solutions. Each machine on the LAN is treated as a single cache node. Squid and Cachelink are investigated as two possible candidates and Cachelink is selected for a detailed performance study. The study demonstrates that Cachelink sharing on a LAN significantly improves web response time and hit ratio. The gains are accomplished with low traffic and disk overhead. The scalability is good, with each cache node able to accommodate a peak load of 45-50 object/second. In conclusion, we propose that an inexpensive, low-management and fault resilient solution with a distributed scheme like Cachelink might be the preferred alternative for web caching on a large intranet.
Date: Tuesday, March 9, 2004
Time: 9:30 AM
Place: 550-PGH
Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Jaspal Subhlok