An Empirical Study of Caching Impact on an AWS Hosted Website

Interest in cloud computing continues to grow, however with so few cloud computing providers available, your cloud-based application might be hosted far from its user community. Such distance might cause concern about your application’s performance; will latency make your site unusable? In this research, a simple website request that yielded a large data response was tested in a distributed environment as follows: a database residing in Ohio, USA, load balanced web servers located in Dublin, Ireland, and a global network of edge servers. Two caching techniques were employed to improve performance: (1) an in-memory data store was made available to cache database query results and (2) edge caching at the global edge server locations was enabled. Different caching configurations were tested, and performance improvements were observed as cache expiration periods were adjusted.