Site-based approach in HTTP proxy design

Due to the explosive growth of the World-Wide Web, Web proxy becomes very important in today´s Internet systems. Among these proxy servers, most of them will make cache decision based on document names. However, we propose in this paper a new direction in making these caching decisions, namely a site-based approach. What we mean by site-based approach is that a proxy only considers the site name of a document in making caching decisions. If a replacement has to be made, all the documents of a site will be deleted from cache at the same time. In this paper, we argue the feasibility of the site-based approach by comparing its caching performance to that of the general document based approach. Our simulation results show that caching based on site names only will not degrade the cache performance. But as discussed in this paper, caching based on site names only will bring a lot of benefits in designing fast proxy servers.