Web Caching: Reducing Network Traffic - Softcover

Wessels, Duane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 156592536X ISBN 13: 9781565925366

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, 2001

Synopsis

On the World Wide Web, speed and efficiency are vital. Users have little patience for slow web pages, while network administrators want to make the most of their available bandwidth. A properly designed web cache reduces network traffic and improves access times to popular web sites--a boon to network administrators and web users alike.Web Caching hands you all the technical information you need to design, deploy, and operate an effective web caching service. It starts with the basics of how web caching works, from the HTTP headers that govern cachability to cache validation and replacement algorithms.Topics covered in this book include:

• Designing an effective cache solution
• Configuring web browsers to use a cache
• Setting up a collection of caches that can talk to each other
• Configuring an interception cache or proxy
• Monitoring and fine-tuning the performance of a cache
• Configuring web servers to cooperate with web caches
• Benchmarking cache products

The book also covers the important political aspects of web caching, including privacy, intellectual property, and security issues.Internet service providers, large corporations, or educational institutions--in short, any network that provides connectivity to a wide variety of users--can reap enormous benefit from running a well-tuned web caching service. Web Caching shows you how to do it right.

About this title

Review

Web Caching explores the intricacies of implementing caching in Web server environments to reduce network traffic and improve performance. Like so many areas of Internet technology, the topic of Web caching comprises a number of architectural and practical issues that could take a career to learn the hard way. Fortunately, author Duane Wessels has organized all the nuts-and-bolts technical information in this short book.

This guide to turbo-charging the Web is primarily geared toward system administrators; however, Web developers can also learn much about the proper--and improper--use of caching their pages. The book begins with excellent chapters on the big picture of how Web caching works, including the various types of caches, hit measurements, validation, and cache refreshing. Before turning to this guide's core focus--designing and implementing caching--the author spends a chapter to explore the political issues surrounding the technology, such as privacy, content distribution, and copyrights.

Both client and server configurations are considered, and the benefits of Netscape and Microsoft implementations are explored. The journey through the efficient travels of Web requests is fascinating as you learn about proxies, intercache protocols, cache hierarchies, and benchmarking methodologies for measuring the efficiency of your solutions. Dishing up requests elegantly is not a trivial task on today's Web, but this no-nonsense book is a great help toward that goal. --Stephen W. Plain

Topics covered:

• Web transport protocols
• HTTP and proxy requests
• Cache replacement and refreshing
• Political concerns
• Client configuration
• Interception proxying
• Server configuration
• Cache hierarchies
• Intercache protocols
• Cache clustering
• Monitoring/benchmarking
• Cache trace analysis

About the Author

Duane Wessels became interested in web caching in 1994 as a topic for his master's thesis in telecommunications at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He worked with members of the Harvest research project to develop web caching software. After the departure of other members to industry jobs, he continued the software development under the name Squid. Another significant part of Duane's research with the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research has been the operation of 6 to 8 large caches throughout the U.S. These caches receive requests from hundreds of other caches, all connected in a "global cache mesh."

Edition details

• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 156592536X
• ISBN 13: 9781565925366
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 318