Paper on Performance of Web Proxy Caching in Heterogeneous Bandwidth Environments
From: Anja Feldmann (anja@research.att.com)
Date: Fri, Apr 09 1999
Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 14:40:09 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <199904091840.OAA23935@spectrum.research.att.com>
From: Anja Feldmann <anja@research.att.com>
To: www-wca@w3.org
Subject: Paper on Performance of Web Proxy Caching in Heterogeneous Bandwidth Environments
The following paper just appeared at IEEE INFOCOM 1999
Title: Performance of Web Proxy Caching
in Heterogeneous Bandwidth Environments
Authors: Anja Feldmann, Ramon Caceres, Fred Douglis, Gideon Glass,
Michael Rabinovich.
Pointers: "http://www.research.att.com/~anja/feldmann/papers/infocom99_proxim.ps"
"http://www.research.att.com/~anja/feldmann/papers/infocom99_proxim.ps.gz"
Abstract:
Much work on the performance of Web proxy caching has focused on high-level
metrics such as hit rates, but has ignored low-level details such as
cookies, aborted connections, and persistent connections between clients
and proxies as well as between proxies and servers. These details have a
strong impact on performance, particularly in heterogeneous bandwidth
environments where network speeds between clients and proxies are
significantly different than speeds between proxies and servers.
We evaluate through detailed simulations the latency and bandwidth effects
of Web proxy caching in such environments. We drive our simulations with
packet traces from two scenarios: clients connected through slow dialup
modems to a commercial ISP, and clients on a fast LAN in an industrial
research lab. We present three main results. One, caching persistent
connections at the proxy can improve latency much more than simply caching
Web data. Two, aborted connections can waste more bandwidth than that
saved by caching data. Three, ``cookies'' can dramatically reduce hit
rates by making many documents effectively uncacheable.