Developing a Web Caching architecture with configurable consistency: A proposal

In recent years, Web Caching has been considered one of the key areas to improve web usage efficiency. However, caching web objects proposes many considerations about the validity of the cache. Ideally, it would be valuable to have a consistent cache, where no invalid relationships among objects are held. Several alternatives have been offered to keep consistency in the web cache, each one being better in different situations and for diverse requirements. Usually, web cachers implement just one strategy for maintaining consistency, sometimes giving bad results if circumstances are not appropriate for such strategy. Given that, a web cacher where this policy can be adapted to different situations, will offer good results in an execution with changing conditions. A web caching architecture is proposed as a testbed for consistency models, allowing both timing and ordering issues to be considered.