Abstract:
As Internet traffic continues to grow and websites become increasingly complex, performance and scalability are major issues for websites. Websites are increasingly relying on dynamic content generation applications to provide website visitors with dynamic, interactive, and personalized experiences. However, dynamic content generation comes at a cost---each request requires computation as well as communication across multiple components. To address these issues, various dynamic content caching approaches have been proposed. Proxy-based caching approaches store content at various locations outside the site infrastructure and can improve website performance by reducing content generation delays, firewall processing delays, and bandwidth requirements. However, existing proxy-based caching approaches either (a) cache at the page level, which does not guarantee that correct pages are served and provides very limited reusability, or (b) cache at the fragment level, which is associated with several design-level and runtime scalability issues. To address these issues, several back-end caching approaches have been proposed, including query result caching and fragment level caching. While back-end approaches guarantee the correctness of results and offer the advantages of fine-grained caching, they neither address firewall delays nor reduce bandwidth requirements. We present a dynamic proxy caching approach which combines the benefits of both proxy-based and back-end caching approaches, yet does not suffer from their above-mentioned limitations. Our dynamic proxy caching technique allows granular, proxy-based caching in highly dynamic scenarios, accessible outside the site infrastructure.

Bio:
Debra VanderMeer serves on the faculty of the Department of Decision Sciences and Information Systems in the College of Business at Florida International University. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in May 2003. She also holds a MS in MIS from the University of Arizona, and a BS from Georgetown University. Her research interests include data management, web-based infrastructures and mobile computing. She is widely published in well-known forums, such as Management Science, ACM Transactions on Database Systems, and the International Conference on Data Engineering. She also has significant industry experience in the software industry.