Dynamic information-based scalable hashing on a cluster of web cache servers

Abstract

Caching web pages is an important part of web infrastructures. Medium to large-scale infrastructures deploy a cluster of servers to solve the scalability and storage problems inherent in caching. In this paper we present dynamic information-based scalable hashing that evenly hashes client requests to a cluster of cache servers, resulting in performance scalability. Runtime information is used to determine when and how to cache pages. Cached pages are stored and retrieved mutually exclusively to/from all the servers to minimize the use of storage, resulting in storage scalability. We set up an experimental environment consisting of various machines, including client servers, a cluster of 16 cache servers, and a load balancer. We demonstrate through experimental results that dynamic information-based scalable hashing maximizes both performance scalability and storage scalability while the existing approaches do only either one of the two. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.