Caching Techniques for Dynamic Web Servers

Many websites incorporate dynamic web-pages in order to deliver customized contents to their users. Websites are shifting from a static model to a dynamic model, in order to deliver their users with dynamic, interactive, and personalized experiences. However, dynamic content generation comes at a cost – each request requires computation as well as communication across multiple components within the website and across the Internet. In fact, dynamic pages are constructed on the fly, “on demand”. Hence dynamic pages, due to their construction overheads and non-cacheability, result in substantially increased user response times, server load, and increased bandwidth consumption, as compared to traditional static pages. Due to continuous growth of Internet traffic and websites becoming increasingly complex, performance and scalability are becoming major issues for dynamic websites. This thesis presents some novel ways of integrating existing solutions to address performance and scalability issues. Specifically, it aims at achieving reduced bandwidth consumption from web infrastructure perspective, and reduced page construction times from user perspective. To address performance and scalability issues, various dynamic content caching approaches have been proposed in the literature. These approaches can be broadly classified into two categories: proxy-based caching approaches and server-side caching approaches (also called as back-end caching approaches). Proxy-based caching approaches store content at various locations outside the site infrastructure and can improve website performance by reducing content generation delays, firewall processing delays, and bandwidth requirements. However, existing proxy-based