2000/06/01 by Li Fan, Pei Cao, Jussara M. Almeida +1 · 14 citations
Computer Science · #Caching and Content Delivery #Advanced Data Storage Technologies #Network Packet Processing and Optimization #Computer science #Cache #Cache invalidation #MESI protocol #Cache algorithms #Smart Cache #Computer network #Cache pollution #Bus sniffing #Cache coloring #Page cache #Distributed computing #CPU cache
paper · doi:10.1109/90.851975
openalex publication_date 2000/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
The sharing of caches among Web proxies is an important technique to reduce Web traffic and alleviate network bottlenecks. Nevertheless it is not widely deployed due to the overhead of existing protocols. In this paper we demonstrate the benefits of cache sharing, measure the overhead of the existing protocols, and propose a new protocol called "summary cache". In this new protocol, each proxy keeps a summary of the cache directory of each participating proxy, and checks these summaries for potential hits before sending any queries. Two factors contribute to our protocol's low overhead: the summaries are updated only periodically, and the directory representations are very economical, as low as 8 bits per entry. Using trace-driven simulations and a prototype implementation, we show that, compared to existing protocols such as the Internet cache protocol (ICP), summary cache reduces the number of intercache protocol messages by a factor of 25 to 60, reduces the bandwidth consumption by over 50%, eliminates 30% to 95% of the protocol CPU overhead, all while maintaining almost the same cache hit ratios as ICP. Hence summary cache scales to a large number of proxies. (This paper is a revision of Fan et al. 1998; we add more data and analysis in this version.).