Patent US 8,028,056

A software framework configured to execute in a computer system and adapted to monitor statistics associated with one or more servers coupled to the computer system is disclosed. A data structure is configured to store statistics associated with the one or more servers coupled to the computer system. A server-monitoring thread is configured to update at least some of the statistics stored in the data structure, the server-monitoring thread to execute on a processor of the computer system. An application programming interface (API) responsive to a plurality of software modules executes in the computer system, the API is configured to process requests from the plurality of software modules for (i) adding or removing servers in the data structure or (ii) accessing statistics from the data structure. The computer system may be a network cache.