WisWeb: Scalable, Consistent, High-Performance Web Services


Supported by NSF Career Award No. NSF-CCR-9743437.

Research Note: Persistent Connection Behavior of Popular Browsers

NEW: A Comparison of Public Proxy Software using Wisconsin Proxy Benchmark

NEW: WisWeb group proudly presents Active Cache1.0. Click here for more detail.


Introduction


Today, four-tier web-enabled information accesses (Figure 1) are increasingly common: clients connect to proxies, which use Internet to access HTTP servers, who are front ends of document stores or databases. WisWeb focuses on caching and performance issues related to proxies and HTTP servers, which have a large impact on users' experience of the Internet and the Web.

On the caching aspect, WisWeb addresses the multiple obstacles to Web caching. Though touted as the only way to sustain the Web's exponential growth, caching has not enjoyed as a significant growth as it should have. Obstacles include cache busting from servers, "reload" by users, poor proxy caching performance, and copyright concerns. Some of the issues, such as copyright concerns, are being addressed by the Internet community. WisWeb addresses the technical issues, particularly, providing strong cache consistency, support for server control on cache access, scalable cache sharing, and effective prefetching/prepushing mechanisms.

On the performance aspect, WisWeb studies the benchmarking, measurement and performance optimization for high-performance, high-availability proxies and HTTP servers. The workload characteristics and scalability requirements on these systems are very different from those on traditional time-sharing local-area-network systems. Appropriate benchmarks that reflect workloads in the Internet, measurement and monitoring of the systems, design and implementation that can sustain the scalability and reliability requirements, are all challenges.

WisWeb Initiatives

WisWeb Group Members

Former group members, Li Fan, Chengjie Liu and Dhaval Shah are now working in industry.

Papers

Here is a list of our recent publications.

Software and Traces