Caching in the Distributed Environment

The impact of cache is well understood in the system design domain. While the concept of cache is extensively utilized in the von Neumann architecture, the same is not true for the distributed-computing architecture. For example, consider a three-tiered Web-based business application running on a commercial RDBMS. Every time a new Web page loads, many database calls are made to fill the drop down lists on the page. Performance of the application is greatly affected by the unnecessary database calls and the network traffic between the Web server and the database server.