On Reducing Dynamic Web Page Construction Times.pdfVIP

On Reducing Dynamic Web Page Construction Times Suresha and Jayant R. Haritsa Dept. of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, INDIA Abstract. Many web sites incorporate dynamic web pages to deliver customized contents to their users. However, dynamic pages result in increased user response times due to their construction overheads. In this paper, we consider mechanisms for reducing these overheads by utilizing the excess capacity with which web servers are typically provisioned. Specifically, we present a caching technique that integrates fragment caching with anticipatory page pre-generation in order to deliver dynamic pages faster during normal operating situations. A feedback mechanism is used to tune the page pre-generation process to match the current system load. The experimental results from a detailed simulation study of our technique indicate that, given a fixed cache budget, page construction speedups of more than fifty percent can be consistently achieved as compared to a pure fragment caching approach. 1 Introduction Web sites are increasingly shifting from a static web page service model to a dynamic web page service model in order to facilitate delivery of custom content to users [4]. While dynamic web pages enable much richer interactions than static pages, these ben- efits are obtained at the cost of significantly increased user response times, due to the on-demand page construction. Dynamic web pages also seriously reduce the perfor- mance of the Web server due to the load incurred by the generation process. In fact, it has been recently estimated that server-side latency accounts for 40 percent of the total page delivery time experienced by end-users [6]. Hence, performance and scalabilit