World Wide Web caching: the application-level view of the Internet

The Internet has fallen prey to its most successful service, the World Wide Web. The networks do not keep up with the demands incurred by the huge amount of Web surfers. Thus, it takes longer and longer to obtain the information one wants to access via the World Wide Web. Many solutions to the problem of network congestion have been developed in distributed systems research in general and distributed file and database systems in particular. The introduction of caching and replication strategies has proven to help in many situations; therefore, these techniques are also applied to the Web. Although most problems and associated solutions are known, some circumstances are different with the Web, forcing the adaptation of known strategies. This article gives an overview of these differences and currently deployed, developed, and evaluated solutions.