A Fault-Tolerant Cache Service for Web Search Engines: Radic Evaluation

Large Web search engines are constructed as a collection of services that are deployed on dedicated clusters of distributed-memory processors. In particular, efficient query throughput heavily relies on using result cache services devoted to maintaining the answers to most frequent queries. Load balancing and fault tolerance are critical to this service. A previous paper [7] described the design of a result cache service based on consistent hashing and a strategy for enabling fault tolerance. This paper goes further into implementation details and experiments related to the basic scheme to support fault-tolerance which is critical for overall performance. To this end, we evaluate the performance of the RADIC scheme [14] for fault-tolerance under demanding scenarios imposed in the caching service. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.