A Simple and Effective Caching Scheme for Dynamic Content

As web sites increasingly deliver dynamic content, the process of content generation at request time is becoming a severe limitation to web site throughput. Recent studies have shown that much of the dynamic content is, however, better characterized as pseudo-dynamic, i.e., a dynamic composition of stored or static data. Consequently, caching the generated web pages may increase the web server's throughput if there is some temporal locality in the request stream. In this paper, we perform a quantitative analysis of the benefits of caching for dynamic content using the e-commerce benchmark, TPC-W,as the workload. We implement caching through a simple and efficient Apache extension module, DCache, that can be easily incorporated into the current infrastructure for dynamic content delivery. Our DCache module uses conventional expiration times and our own request-initiated invalidation scheme as the methods for keeping the cache consistent. It also supports site-specific optimization by providing a mechanism to incorporate the priorities of specific web pages into the caching scheme. Our experiments show that we can obtain over 3 times the non-caching throughput with our caching approach