Web Caching with Consistent Hashing

A key performance measure for the World Wide Web is the speed with which content is served to users. As traffic on the Web increases, users are faced with increasing delays and failures in data delivery. Web caching is one of the key strategies that has been explored to improve performance. An important issue in many caching systems is how to decide what is cached where at any given time. Solutions have included multicast queries and directory schemes. In this paper, we offer a new Web caching strategy based on consistent hashing. Consistent hashing provides an alternative to multicast and directory schemes, and has several other advantages in load balancing and fault tolerance. Its performance was analyzed theoretically in previous work; in this paper we describe the implementation of a consistent-hashing-based system and experiments that support our thesis that it can provide performance improvements. 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1999
• Where: CN
• Authors: David R. Karger, Alex Sherman, Andy Berkheimer, Bill Bogstad, Rizwan Dhanidina, Ken Iwamoto, Brian Kim, Luke Matkins, Yoav Yerushalmi
• Keywords: CN 1999, Key Performance Measure, Performance, World Wide Web