Cooperative web caching of dynamic web content

Web caching is one of many applications argued to benefit from a switch from a client-server to a peer-to-peer architecture. Several projects suggested the use of a network of peers to provide cached web content in order to help sites survive a burst of user requests. We present a new system that targets web sites with dynamic content and allows them to use a group of a variable number of volunteer peers to provide cached web content to the clients. The main objective of our system is to increase the capacity of a web server, and to reduce the average end user latency. We implement an Internet forums application using our approach as a case study of dynamic web sites, and emulate the implementation on a single machine. We show and analyze the results of experiments we applied on the emulated system, focusing on measurements of average end user latency and the upload bandwidth used by the web server.