Proxy Cache Replacement Algorithms: A History-Based Approach

Accesing and circulation of Web objects has been facilitated by the design and implementation of effective caching schemes. Web caching has been integrated in prototype and commercial Web-based information systems in order to reduce the overall bandwidth and increase system's fault tolerance. This paper presents an overview of a series of Web cache replacement algorithms based on the idea of preserving a history record for cached Web objects. The number of references to Web objects over a certain time period is a critical parameter for the cache content replacement. The proposed algorithms are simulated and experimented under a real workload of Web cache traces provided by a major (Squid) proxy cache server installation. Cache and bytes hit rates are given with respect to different cache sizes and a varying number of request workload sets and it is shown that the proposed cache replacement algorithms improve both cache and byte hit rates. © 2001, Kluwer Academic Publishers.