Walrus-a low latency, high throughput Web service using Internet-wide replication

Today, most of the popular Web sites are served from single locations. This basic Web client-server model is easy to deploy and maintain and thus is very successful. It suffers, however, from several efficiency and availability problems. This paper presents Walrus, a low-latency, high-throughput Web service that addresses some of these problems. Under Walrus, a single logical Web server can be replicated to several clusters of identical servers where each cluster resides in a different part of the Internet. An important aspect of Walrus is its ability to transparently direct the Web browser to the best replica without any changes to the Web server, Web client, and network infrastructure. "Best" is a relative term, dependent on where the client is located on the network, the load on each replica, and more. Walrus deploys on elegant algorithm that balances these considerations.