Computing and Informatics

Object replication is a well-known technique to improve the accessibility of the Web sites. It generally offers reduced client latencies and increases a site's availability. However, applying replication techniques is not trivial and a large number of heuristics have been proposed to decide the number of replicas of an object and their placement in a distributed web server system. This paper presents three object placement and replication algorithms. The first two heuristics are centralized in the sense that a central site determines the number of replicas and their placement. Due to the dynamic nature of the Internet traffic and the rapid change in the access pattern of the World-Wide Web, we also propose a distributed algorithm where each site relies on some locally collected information to decide what objects should be replicated at that site. The performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated through a simulation study. Also, the performance of the proposed algorithms has been compared with that of three other well-known algorithms and the results are presented. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithms.