WEB SERVER CONTENT REPLICATION

• US 20030041093A1
• Filed: 08/19/1999
• Published: 02/27/2003
• Est. Priority Date: 05/29/1998
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: R2 Solutions LLC (Acacia Research Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Yahoo! Inc. (Apollo Global Management, Inc.)
• Inventors: MATEOS, ARTHUR, DEBETTENCOURT, JASON, YAMANE, STANLEY, LARA, MARCO, SHAH, SWAPNIL, WENG, KEITH
• Granted Patent: US 7,035,943 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/201
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0709 in a distributed system consisting of a plurality of standalone computer nodes, e.g. clusters, client-server systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0793 Remedial or corrective actions recovery from an exception in an instruction pipeline G06F9/3861; by retry G06F11/1402; for recovering from a failure of a protocol instance or entity H04L69/40
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3495 for systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9574 of access to content, e.g. by caching
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/958 Organisation or management of web site content, e.g. publishing, maintaining pages or automatic linking
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/875 Monitoring of systems including the internet
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/88 Monitoring involving counting
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/046 comprising network management agents or mobile agents therefor
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/069 using logs of notifications; Post-processing of notifications
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0896 Bandwidth or capacity management, i.e. automatically increasing or decreasing capacities flow or congestion control using dynamic resource allocation, e.g. in-call renegotiation, H04L47/76
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/5083 wherein the managed service relates to web hosting
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/02 based on web technology, e.g. hypertext transfer protocol [HTTP]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1001 for accessing one among a plurality of replicated servers
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1008 based on parameters of servers, e.g. available memory or workload monitoring of computer activity G06F11/30
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1029 using data related to the state of servers by a load balancer
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1031 Controlling of the operation of servers by a load balancer, e.g. adding or removing servers that serve requests
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1095 Replication or mirroring of data, e.g. scheduling or transport for data synchronisation between network nodes
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/56 Provisioning of proxy services store-and-forward switching systems in data switching networks H04L12/54
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/563 Data redirection of data network streams
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/564 Enhancement of application control based on intercepted application data
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/5682 : Policies or rules for updating, deleting or replacing the stored data

Abstract

This invention relates to managing multiple web servers, and more particularly to a web service system and method that allows a system operator to distribute content to each web server in the web service system and notifying a computer, such as a cache server, of content changes. In one embodiment, a method for notifying a computer of changed files includes identifying changes in a source file set, storing the identified changes in a modification list comprising uniform resource locators specifying the changed files, and transmitting the modification list to a computer. In another embodiment, a method for replicating changes in a source file set on a destination file system and for notifying a computer of the changes includes identifying changes in a source file set, storing the changes in a first modification list, and transmitting the first modification list to an agent having access to a destination file system. The method also includes storing the changes in a second modification list comprising uniform resource locators specifying the changed files, and transmitting the second modification list to a computer. In yet another embodiment, a method for replicating changes in a source file set on a destination file system and for notifying a computer of the changes includes identifying changes in a source file set, storing changes in a modification list comprising uniform resource locators specifying the changed files, transmitting the modification list to an agent having access to a destination file system, and transmitting the modification list to a computer. An embodiment of a web service system includes a manager for managing the web service system, a host including a web server for receiving web page requests and an agent in communication with the manager, a web cache, and a content distributor for providing content changes to the host. An embodiment of a content distributor includes an identification module for identifying changes in a source file set, a modification list for storing identified changes, a transmitter for transmitting the modification list to an agent having access to a destination file system, and a transmitter for transmitting the changed files to a web cache server.

Claims

1. A method for notifying a computer of changed files, comprising the steps of:

(a) identifying changes in a source file set;

(b) storing the identified changes in a modification list comprising uniform resource locators specifying the changed files; and

(c) transmitting the modification list to a computer.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein step (c) comprises transmitting the modification list to a web cache server.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein the identifying step comprises the steps of:

inspecting a set of files; and

comparing the set of files to an earlier-recorded set.

4. The method of claim 3 wherein the comparing step comprises comparing a file attribute to the file attribute of the earlier-recorded set.

5. The method of claim 4 wherein the file attribute comprises at least one attribute chosen from the set of file size, file permissions, file ownership, modification time, and a hash of the file.

6. The method of claim 1 wherein the identifying step comprises the steps of:

installing a device driver to perform file operations; and

recording, by the device driver, changes to the source file set.

7. The method of claim 1 wherein the identifying step comprises:

receiving a manifest describing changes to the source file set.

8. The method of claim 1, further comprising, before the identifying step, the step of calling a script.

9. The method of claim 1, further comprising, before the transmitting step, the step of calling a script.

10. The method of claim 1, further comprising, after the transmitting step, the step of calling a script.

11. The method of claim 10, further comprising the step of determining whether the transmitting step has successfully completed, and wherein the calling step occurs after the determining step.

12. A method for replicating changes in a source file set on a destination file system and for notifying a computer of the changes, comprising the steps of:

(a) identifying changes in a source file set;

(b) storing the changes in a first modification list;

(c) transmitting the first modification list to an agent having access to a destination file system;

(d) storing the changes in a second modification list comprising uniform resource locators specifying the changed files; and

(e) transmitting the second modification list to a computer.

13. The method of claim 12 wherein the computer is a web cache server.

14. The method of claim 12 further comprising, before step (d), the step of converting the first modification list into the second modification list

15. A method for replicating changes in a source file set on a destination file system and for notifying a computer of the changes, comprising the steps of:

(a) identifying changes in a source file set;

(b) storing changes in a modification list comprising uniform resource locators specifying the changed files;

(c) transmitting the modification list to an agent having access to a destination file system; and

(d) transmitting the modification list to a computer.

16. A web service system, comprising:

a manager for managing the web service system;

a host comprising a web server for receiving web page requests and an agent in communication with the manager;

a web cache; and

a content distributor for providing content changes to the host.

17. The system of claim 16, further comprising a traffic manager for directing web page requests to the web server.

18. The system of claim 16, wherein the content distributor comprises:

(a) an identification module for identifying changes in a source file set;

(b) a modification list for storing identified changes; and

(c) a transmitter for transmitting the modification list to an agent having access to a destination file system.

19. The system of claim 18, further comprising a transmitter for transmitting the changed files to the agent.

20. A content distributor, comprising:

(a) an identification module for identifying changes in a source file set;

(b) a modification list for storing identified changes;

(c) a transmitter for transmitting the modification list to an agent having access to a destination file system; and

(d) a transmitter for transmitting the changed files to a web cache server.