RFC 1862 (rfc1862) - Page 3 of 27
Report of the IAB Workshop on Internet Information Infrastructure, October 12-14, 1994
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1862 IAB Workshop Report November 1995
- articulating the procedures necessary to facilitate joining IETF
working group meetings, and
- reviewing the key distribution infrastructure for use in
information applications
3. Group 1 report: The Distributed Database Problem
Elise Gerich, Tim Berners-Lee, Mark McCahill, Dave Sincoskie, Mike
Schwartz, Mitra, Yakov Rekhter, John Klensin, Steve Crocker, Ton
Verschuren
Editors: Mark McCahill, Mike Schwartz, Ton Verschuren
3.1 Problem and Needs
Because of the increasing popularity of accessing networked
information, current Internet information services are experiencing
performance, reliability, and scaling problems. These are general
problems, given the distributed nature of the Internet. Current and
future applications would benefit from much more widespread use of
caching and replication.
For instance, popular WWW and Gopher servers experience serious
overloading, as many thousands of users per day attempt to access
them simultaneously. Neither of these systems was designed with
explicit caching or replication support in the core protocol.
Moreover, because the DNS is currently the only widely deployed
distributed and replicated data storage system in the Internet, it is
often used to help support more scalable operation in this
environment -- for example, storing service-specific pointer
information, or providing a means of rotating service accesses among
replicated copies of NCSA's extremely popular WWW server. In most
cases, such uses of the DNS semantically overload the system. The
DNS may not be able to stand such "semantic extensions" and continue
to perform well. It was not designed to be a general-purpose
replicated distributed database system.
There are many examples of systems that need or would benefit from
caching or replication. Examples include key distribution for
authentication services, DHCP, multicast SD, and Internet white
pages.
To date there have been a number of independent attempts to provide
caching and replication facilities. The question we address here is
whether it might be possible to define a general service interface or
protocol, so that caches and replica servers (implemented in a
variety of ways to support a range of different situations) might
McCahill, et al Informational