Web object-based storage management in proxy caches

Proxy caches are essential to improve the performance of the World Wide Web and to enhance user perceived latency. Appropriate cache management strategies are crucial to achieve these goals. In our previous work, we have introduced Web object-based caching policies. A Web object consists of the main HTML page and all of its constituent embedded files. Our studies have shown that these policies improve proxy cache performance substantially. In this paper, we propose a new Web object-based policy to manage the storage system of a proxy cache. We propose two techniques to improve the storage system performance. The first technique is concerned with prefetching the related files belonging to a Web object, from the disk to main memory. This prefetching improves performance as most of the files can be provided from the main memory rather than from the proxy disk. The second technique stores the Web object members in contiguous disk blocks in order to reduce the disk access time. We used trace-driven simulations to study the performance improvements one can obtain with these two techniques. Our results show that the first technique by itself provides up to 50% reduction in hit latency, which is the delay involved in providing a hit document by the proxy. An additional 5% improvement can be obtained by incorporating the second technique. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V.. All rights reserved.