World-Wide Web Caching - The Application level view of the Internet
- The Internet has fallen prey to its most successful service, the World-Wide Web. The networksdo not keep up with the demands incurred by the huge amount of Web surfers. Thus, it takeslonger and longer to obtain the information one wants to access via the World-Wide Web.Many solutions to the problem of network congestion have been developed in distributed sys-tems research in general and distributed file and database systems in particular. The introduc-tion of caching and replication strategies has proven to help in many situations and thereforethese techniques are also applied to the WWW. Although most problems and associated solu-tions are known, some circumstances are different with the Web, forcing the adaptation ofknown strategies. This paper gives an overview about these differences and about currentlydeployed, developed, and evaluated solutions.