Authors: Michael Sparks, George Neisser, Richard Hanby
The UK National JANET Cache serves the UK academic and research community, which includes universities, colleges, research establishments and other organisations, and is funded by the UK Higher Education Funding Council. Its primary objectives are: a) to minimise request response time, (or latency); and b), to minimise the cost of using expensive communications links: in other words to deliver an excellent service whilst ensuring maximum value for money.
In this paper we describe briefly the JANET Cache and the national caching infrastructure in which the JANET Cache plays a pivotal role. We then move on to the main theme, namely the presentation of an initial analysis of JANET Cache usage and performance. Because of the vast amount of logging information available, the bulk of this analysis has been restricted to a four week period in September and October 1998. It is our intention, once additional computing resources come online, to extend this analysis to cover the UK National JANET Cache Service from its inception on 1st August 1997 to the present day. This will be the subject of a future paper.
The initial analysis has yielded many interesting and useful results and conclusions which are summarised and discussed below. In particular it indicates how effective caching is from a user service perspective and the amount of bandwidth actually saved in a real production environment.
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