Vcache: Caching Dynamic Documents

TL;DR

Vcache introduces an automatic method to cache dynamic web documents by decomposing them into templates and bindings, addressing limitations of traditional static caching.

Contribution

It presents a novel, fully automatic technique for caching dynamic documents by hierarchical decomposition, improving caching efficiency for server-side generated pages.

Findings

Vcache effectively caches dynamic documents with high similarity.

The technique improves web caching performance.

Applicable to languages like Perl and C generating web pages.

Abstract

The traditional web caching is currently limited to static documents only. A page generated on the fly from a server side script may have different contents on different accesses and hence cannot be cached. A number of proposals for attacking the problem have emerged based on the observation that different instances of a dynamic document are usually quite similar in most cases, i.e. they have a lot of common HTML code. In this paper, we first review these related techniques and show their inadequacy for practical use. We then present a general and fully automatic technique called Vcache based on the decomposition of dynamic documents into a hierarchy of templates and bindings. The technique is designed keeping in mind languages like Perl and C etc that generate the documents using low-level print like statements. These languages together, account for the largest number of dynamic documents on the web.