Differentiated strategies for replicating Web documents

Replicating Web documents reduces user-perceived delays and wide-area network traffic. Numerous caching and replication protocols have been proposed to manage such replication while keeping the document copies consistent. We claim, however, that no single caching or replication policy can efficiently manage all documents. Instead, we propose that each document be replicated with a policy specifically tailored to it. We have collected traces on our university's Web server and conducted simulations to determine the performance such tailored policies would produce, as opposed to using the same policy for all documents. The results show a significant performance improvement with respect to end-user delays, wide-area network traffic and document consistency. We also present how these results can be used to build adaptive replicated Web documents, capable of automatically selecting the policy that best suits them.