Re: Want to add file caching to Apache

["Roy T. Fielding" <fi...@kiwi.ics.uci.edu>]

>I am suggesting and willing to implement a document (file) cache in Apache. (I
>am a Ph.D. student and I am doing reserach in Web caching so
>this could help my dissertation; if I'll ever write one :)

Where have I heard that before?  ;-)

>Finally, let me mention the killer idea (presented in the paper referenced
>above). I know most of you will not like it but I still believe that it's nice
>and useful. The paper talks about static caching, that is filling the cache
>once a day (week,etc) and not replacing anything till the end of the day. As
>odd as it may look, this policy often performs better than anything else. Its
>main advanatge is that there is absolutely no extra overhead during the entire
>day. Refilling a cache should take no more than a minute, so it shouldn't be a
>problem.

That is a reasonable way to do it.  The idea that I've bounded about a few
times is that, rather than LRU, the cache should be pre-populated with the
best fit resources as calculated by the prior day's logfiles (for the same
population period) plus whatever fixed URLs are specified in configuration.
This allows both adaptive and anticipated cache usage.

Just be sure to cache complete HTTP responses --- most people (like the
Harvest stuff) fail to consider the importance of metadata in HTTP.

....Roy