Blog: Faster Websites, More Reliable Data

Faster Websites, More Reliable Data
MIT News (10/14/10) Larry Hardesty

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed TxCache, a database caching system that eliminates certain types of asymmetric data retrieval while making database caches easier to program. TxCache is designed to solve the problem of making sure that data cached on local servers is as current as the data stored in the master database. The MIT system can handle transactions, sets of computations that are treated as a block, which means that none of the computations will be performed unless all of them can be performed. TxCache makes it easier for programmers to manage caches, says MIT graduate student Dan Ports, who led the system's development along with professor Barbara Liskov, who received the 2008 ACM A.M. Turing Award. Ports says TxCache ensures that programmers can change variables in a line of code just once, and have the cached copies be automatically updated everywhere. The system has to track what data are cached where, and which data depend on each other, Liskov says. The researchers say that during testing, Websites using TxCache were more than five times faster.

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