The continuing growth of the World-Wide Web is placing increasing demands on popular Web servers. Many of these sites are now using distributed Web servers (i.e., groups of machines) to service the increasing number of client requests, as a single server cannot handle the workload. The demand on Web servers will likely increase further as high speed networks become publicly available.
This project is investigating several strategies to improve the performance of a distributed Web server, including load balancing, cooperative caching, and the effective use of geographic distribution of the server machines. Incoming client requests must be distributed in some fashion among the machines in the distributed Web server. Not only should this distribution balance the load on the available servers, but it must do so in a manner that does not increase the latency for the Web user. File caching may also improve the performance of the distributed Web server. File caches store popular documents on (or near) the server, reducing the time needed for the server to prepare its response. A cache manager is used to organize the caching of documents within the distributed Web server, and to ensure that cache consistency is maintained.
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