Design Considerations for Distributed Caching on the Internet

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of an integrated architecture for cache systems that scale to hundreds or thousands of caches with thousands to millions of users. Rather than simply try to maximize hit rates, we take an end-to-end approach to improving response time by also considering hit times and miss times. We begin by studying several Internet caches and workloads, and we derive three core design principles for large scale distributed caches: (1) minimize the number of hops to locate and access data on both hits and misses, (2) share data among many users and scale to many caches, and (3) cache data close to clients. Our strategies for addressing these issues are built around a scalable, high-performance data-location service that tracks where objects are replicated. We describe how to construct such a service and how to use this service to provide direct access to remote data and push-based data replication. We evaluate our system through trace-driven si...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Renu Tewari, Michael Dahlin, Harrick M. Vin, Jonathan S. Kay
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICDCS 1999, Internet Caches, Scale Distributed Caches, We Begin