On the optimality of Least Recently Used

It is well known that competitive analysis yields too pessimistic re-sults when applied to the paging problem and it also cannot make a distinction between many paging strategies. Many deterministic paging algorithms achieve the same competitive ratio, ranging from inefficient strategies as flush-when-full to the good performing least-recently-used (LRU). In this paper, we study this fundamental online problem from the viewpoint of stochastic dominance. We show that when sequences are drawn from distributions modelling locality of reference, LRU is stochastically better than any other online paging algorithm