USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - Internet Technologies & Systems 99
Providing Dynamic and Customizable Caching Policies
J. Fritz Barnes and Raju Pandey, University of California at Davis
Abstract
Web caching has emerged as one solution for improving client
latency on the web. Cache effectiveness depends on the
policies used to route requests to other caches and servers, to
maintain up-to-date web objects and to remove objects from the
cache. Traditional caches apply one set of policies, which
determines the efficiency as well as the effectiveness of the
caches. This set of policies often does not exploit the
diversity inherent in different web objects, caches and
clients. Policies that do exploit this diversity result in
convoluted caching policies that attempt to combine multiple
policies and guess at the unknown characteristics of web
objects, caches and clients.
In this paper, we present an extensible caching infrastructure
in which cache administrators, servers, and end users can
customize how web objects are cached, replaced, and kept
consistent. The infrastructure includes a domain-specific
language, CacheL, for defining customizable caching policies
that can be changed dynamically. Analysis of our prototype,
PoliSquid, shows the benefits of the infrastructure for
variable coherency policies, localized removal policies, and
early removal of objects from servers.
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