Caching Strategies for Data-Intensive Web Sites

Data-intensive Web sites serve large volumes of pages whose content is dynamically extracted from a database. Such Web sites have very high software development and maintenance costs and in general o er poor response times due to the heavy interaction with the database system. This paper introduces the Weave management system developed at INRIA, which alleviates the above shortcomings of data-intensive Web sites. Weave relies on the declarative speci cation of Web sites and o ers a number of tools for the easy implementation, deployment and monitoring of the speci ed site. Weave features a customizable cache system that implements the optimal data materialization strategy according to the Web site's speci cs: it can cache database data, XML fragments and HTML les. To explore Weave's performance we have built a Web site based on the TPC/D benchmark database using the WeaveBench test platform. We conducted a number of experiments with various data materialization strategies supported by our system. Results clearly show that in the general case, a mix of di erent caching policies is required to achieve optimal performance.