CS8803D Course Reading Summaries

Paper #: 8
Title: Speculative Data Dissemination and Service to Reduce Server Load, Network Traffic and Service Time for Distributed Information Systems


Objective:


This paper presents two ways to optimize information distribution systems.  The paper used the World Wide Web as the example of an information distribution system.  The two optimizations presented are: Data dissemination, and Speculative Services




Strengths, and Ideas

Strength:  The ideas are lucidly explained.  As a result the concepts behind each scheme are easy to understand.

Idea:  Data dissemination - this scheme involves caching data from a web server with a series of proxy servers. 

Idea:  Speculative Services - this scheme involves attempting to predict what web pages will be request based on the current request.


Weaknesses:  There is a large amount of mathematical theory presented.


Practical Work:
Both the Data Dissemination experiment, and the  Speculative Services experiment were done over a 22 week period using a university web site system as the test bed.