DBProxy: A dynamic data cache for web applications

Abstract

The majority of web pages served today are generated dynamically, usually by an application server querying a back-end database. To enhance the scalability of dynamic content serving in large sites, application servers are offloaded to front-end nodes, called edge servers. The improvement from such application offloading is marginal, however, if data is still fetched from the origin database system. To further improve scalability and cut response times, data must be effectively cached on such edge servers. The scale of deployment of edge servers and the rising costs of their administration demand that such caches be self-managing and adaptive. In this paper, we describe DBProxy, an edge-of-network semantic data cache for web applications. DBProxy is designed to adapt to changes in the workload in a transparent and graceful fashion by caching a large number of overlapping and dynamically changing "materialized views". New "views" are added automatically while others may be discarded to save space. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of designing and implementing such a dynamic edge data cache, and describe our proposed solutions.