Tel-Aviv University - Computer Science Colloquium
Sunday, January 24, 14:15-15:15
at 14:00 Communication between clients and servers in the Web is performed using TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). TCP first establishes a connection between the two nodes and then sends the data via this open connection. The time needed to open a connection contributes to the latency of servicing a request. Hence, latency can be reduced if open connections are kept idle and re-used for future requests. Indeed, new versions of HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) support persistent TCP connections. Therefore Web entities typically maintain many open TCP connections most of them idle. The number of connections each node can keep open is limited, hence, connection management is increasingly perceived and handled as a caching problem.
I will describe an experimental work in which we compare the performance of different connection caching policies using Web server logs. I will also present a theoretical model for studying connection caching and results about the competitiveness of various policies.
This is joint work with Edith Cohen, Jeffery Oldham and Uri Zwick.
For colloquium schedule, see http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~matias/colloq.html