Globule: A Platform for Self-Replicating Web Documents

Replicating Web documents at a worldwide scale can help reduce user-perceived latency and wide-area network traffic. This paper presents the design of Globule, a platform that automates all aspects of such replication: serverto-server peering negotiation, creation and destruction of replicas, selection of the most appropriate replication strategies on a per-document basis, consistency management and transparent redirection of clients to replicas. Globule is initially directed to support standard Web documents. However, it can also be applied to stream-oriented documents. To facilitate the transition from a non-replicated server to a replicated one, we designed Globule as a module for the Apache Web server. Therefore, converting Web documents should require no more than compiling a new module into Apache and editing a configuration file.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: PROMS
• Authors: Guillaume Pierre, Maarten van Steen
• Keywords: Appropriate Replication Strategies, Multimedia, PROMS 2001, Standard Web Documents, Web Documents