Experimental Analysis of Server-Side Caching for Web Performance

TL;DR

This paper experimentally compares server-side in-memory caching versus no caching in small-scale web applications, demonstrating significant response time improvements and providing insights into simple caching effectiveness.

Contribution

It fills a research gap by empirically analyzing the impact of simple in-memory caching on web performance in small-scale applications.

Findings

Significant reduction in response times with caching

Caching improves web performance in small-scale environments

Results support use of simple caching for educational and small web apps

Abstract

Performance in web applications is a key aspect of user experience and system scalability. Among the different techniques used to improve web application performance, caching has been widely used. While caching has been widely explored in web performance optimization literature, there is a lack of experimental work that explores the effect of simple inmemory caching in small-scale web applications. This paper fills this research gap by experimentally comparing the performance of two server-side web application configurations: one without caching and another with in-memory caching and a fixed time-tolive. The performance evaluation was conducted using a lightweight web server framework, and response times were measured using repeated HTTP requests under identical environmental conditions. The results show a significant reduction in response time for cached requests, and the findings of this paper provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of simple server-side caching in improving web application performance making it suitable for educational environments and small-scale web applications where simplicity and reproducibility are critical.