SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR MANAGING CONNECTIONS BETWEEN CLIENTS AND A SERVER USING CACHE MEMORY TO STORE SERVER RESPONSES

摘要

An adapter card (108) for managing connections between clients (109) and a network server (106) off-loads the connection management burden from the server (106). The adapter card (108) includes a memory (124) with an embedded proxy application (132) and a communication protocol stack (134), a processing unit (126) for executing the application code, a network controller (129) for interfacing with an internetwork (102), and a bus protocol bridge (128) for interfacing with the internal bus (120) of the network server (106). The proxy application (132) receives client requests on behalf of the server (106) over relatively slow and unreliable network connections (104), and submits the requests to the server (106) over fast, reliable bus connections (136). A proxy cache (133) provides storage for server responses, so that the proxy application (132) can provide the stored responses to client (109) without reaccessing the server (106). Buffers are allocated to a particular client connection only after it is determined that data wuill be exhanged between the server (106) and the client (109).