Chapter 7. Static Meets Dynamic Adding Caches to Reduce Costs

Chapter 6, “Static Content Serving for Speed and Glory,” walked you through building a high-capacity static content serving system using a web caching system as the core technology. That software was responsible for fetching static content from “master” servers and peddling the cached content efficiently and inexpensively.

Why is the problem so different when the content is no longer static? Why can’t we use the exact same solution presented in Chapter 6 for dynamic content?

Think of a website as if it were a phone book. A cache is a piece of paper that sits next to your phone book on which you record all the numbers you look up. Sounds like a good idea, right? So much so that you ...

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