A New Efficient Caching Policy for the World Wide Web

With the increasing popularity of the World Wide Web, the amount of information available and the use of Web servers are growing exponentially. In order to reduce the overhead induced by frequent requests to the same documents by local users, client caching and, more generally, proxy-caching have been proposed and are now widely used. Most implementations use traditional memory paging policies, like the Least Recently Used (LRU) policy. However, due to the heterogeneity of the requests of Web traffic, both in the size of the documents and in the network transfer delays, such caching policies are not very efficient. In this work, we propose a new caching policy which takes into account the network latency, the size of the documents, their access frequencies, and the time elapsed since the last reference to documents in the cache. Through trace-driven simulations and for various standard cost criteria (request hit rate, byte hit rate and latency ratio) we show that our policy performs bett..