Web Caching (O'Reilly Internet Series) (Paperback)

by Duane Wessels (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Web Caching explores the intricacies of implementing caching in Web server environments to reduce network traffic and improve performance. Like so many areas of Internet technology, the topic of Web caching comprises a number of architectural and practical issues that could take a career to learn the hard way. Fortunately, author Duane Wessels has organized all the nuts-and-bolts technical information in this short book.

This guide to turbo-charging the Web is primarily geared toward system administrators; however, Web developers can also learn much about the proper--and improper--use of caching their pages. The book begins with excellent chapters on the big picture of how Web caching works, including the various types of caches, hit measurements, validation, and cache refreshing. Before turning to this guide's core focus--designing and implementing caching--the author spends a chapter to explore the political issues surrounding the technology, such as privacy, content distribution, and copyrights.

Both client and server configurations are considered, and the benefits of Netscape and Microsoft implementations are explored. The journey through the efficient travels of Web requests is fascinating as you learn about proxies, intercache protocols, cache hierarchies, and benchmarking methodologies for measuring the efficiency of your solutions. Dishing up requests elegantly is not a trivial task on today's Web, but this no-nonsense book is a great help toward that goal. --Stephen W. Plain

Topics covered:

• Web transport protocols
• HTTP and proxy requests
• Cache replacement and refreshing
• Political concerns
• Client configuration
• Interception proxying
• Server configuration
• Cache hierarchies
• Intercache protocols
• Cache clustering
• Monitoring/benchmarking
• Cache trace analysis

Review
'It provides a good general introduction to caching solution. If all web sites follwed the suggestions on cache-friendliness then the web could be a much faster and more efficient place.' - Andrew Cormack, new@UK, December 2001

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Product Details

• Paperback: 318 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. (June 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156592536X
• ISBN-13: 978-1565925366
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #631,758 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great book for a network/web admin or support tech!, October 17, 2001

By	Jennifer R. Lewis (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In my opinion, this book's intended audience is for either a network/web administrator, or it's for a technical support engineer who supports networks or web sites.
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This book really gives some thorough information about how caching proxies work in relation to the network. It also gives more information that you couldn't get for free from a web site, including performance tips.
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However, if you are a developer that's looking for the "coding" details of caching proxies because you are writing a program that interacts with the caching proxy software, then you want to purchase "Web Proxy Servers" by Ari Luotonen.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great in theory but lacking practical examples, February 16, 2003

By	"websiteowner" (Morecambe, Lancashire UK) - See all my reviews

I bought this one because I knew I was using more server resources than I needed and I wanted to know what sort of things I could do to reduce unnecessary strain on the server.

After reading Web Caching, I soon learned that there was more to the topic than meets the eye. The chapter on politics of caching makes for interesting reading no matter who you are on the web; covering topics such as copyright, privacy and trust, offensive content and maintaining content integrity.

I also learned more about just how important caching is to the web, which convinced me that I really should make my web pages as cache friendly as possible. Not only does the creation of cache friendly pages speed up the delivery of content, but it can also reduce the cost of hosting individual web sites!

As you can imagine, there is a lot of discussion in the book about the communications between server and browser that many of us do not see. Most of this discussion focuses on the use of HTTP headers, but there is little discussion about using various scripting technologies to over-ride the default headers that are used by the server. Even an Appendix chapter to compliment the Perl example given would have been nice, as not everyone has access to their server's settings or knows how to use their language of choice to generate server headers.

All in all Web Caching is an interesting book to read as it certainly makes you think about the issues surrounding the subject. I can't help feeling however that this book was written mainly for the server administrators, as practical examples for those that have no direct control of the server are somewhat lacking...

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Quite What I Had Hoped, August 30, 2001

By	"ankou" (VA USA) - See all my reviews

If you want a book that defines the lingo of web caching, then this is the book for you. It goes into great detail on discussing the things that a good sysadmin should think about when choosing and installing a caching server. However, if you are looking for a reference to help you actually implement the things discussed in this book, then you are sadly mistaken. I was hopeing, at the very least, to have greater information and examples about implementing "Squid," the most popular open source proxy caching server for web clients. I mean after all this book is written by one of the top developers for Squid, Duane Wessels. I do give this book 3 stars though because as a unix/linux sysadmin, many of the ideas and issues discussed in this book merit great consideration. I was just hopeing for more detailed information and examples on how to get these ideas implemented.