WebGraph: a framework for managing and improving performance of dynamic Web content

Abstract

The proportion of dynamic objects has been growing at a fast rate in the World Wide Web. In the e-commerce environment, these objects form the core of all web transactions. However, because of additional resource requirements and the changing nature of these objects, the performance of accessing dynamic Web contents has been observed to be poor in the current generation Web services. We propose a framework called WebGraph that helps in improving the response time for accessing dynamic objects. The WebGraph framework manages a graph for each of the Web pages. The nodes of the graph represent weblets, which are components of the Web pages that either stay static or change simultaneously. The edges of the graph define the inclusiveness of the weblets. Both the nodes and the edges have attributes that are used in managing the Web pages. Instead of recomputing and recreating the entire page, the node and edge attributes are used to update a subset of the weblets are then integrated to form the entire page. In addition to the performance benefits in terms of lower response time, the WebGraph framework facilitates Web caching, quality-of-service (QoS) support, load balancing, overload control, personalized services, and security for both dynamic as well as static Web pages. A detailed implementation methodology for the proposed framework is also described. We have implemented the WebGraph framework in an experimental setup and have measured the performance improvement in terms of server response time, throughput, and connection rate. The results demonstrate the feasibility and validates a subset of the advantages of the proposed framework.