DATE: Thursday, December 7, 2000
TIME: Noon - 1 pm
PLACE: Wean Hall 8220

SPEAKER:
Liddy Shriver
Bell Laboratories

TITLE:
Storage Management for Web Proxies

ABSTRACT:
Today, caching web proxies use general purpose file systems to store web objects. Proxies, e.g., Squid or Apache, when running on a UNIX system, typically use the standard UNIX file system (UFS) for this purpose. UFS was designed for research and engineering environments, which have different characteristics from that of a caching web proxy. Some of the differences are high temporal locality, relaxed persistence and a different read/write ratio. In this paper, we characterize the web proxy workload, describe the design of Hummingbird, a light-weight file system for web proxies, and present performance measurements of Hummingbird. Hummingbird has two distinguishing features: it separates object naming and locality through direct application-provided hints, and its clients are compiled with a linked library interface for memory sharing. When we simulated a proxy, Hummingbird achieves document request throughput 5-13 times larger than with several different versions of UFS. Our simulation results are verified within the Polygraph proxy benchmarking environment.

BIO:
Liddy Shriver graduated from NYU with a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1997. After a brief postdoc at HP Labs in Palo Alto, CA, she has been working at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ. Her areas of research are disk performance, file systems, and web searching.

SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/