On-Line File Caching

Consider the following file caching problem: in response to a sequence of requests for files, where each file has a specified size and retrieval cost, maintain a cache of files of total size at most some specified k so as to minimize the total retrieval cost. Specifically, when a requested file is not in the cache, bring it into the cache, pay the retrieval cost, and choose files to remove from the cache so that the total size of files in the cache is at most k. This problem generalizes previous paging and caching problems by allowing objects of arbitrary size and cost, both important attributes when caching files for world-wide-web browsers, servers, and proxies. We give a simple deterministic on-line algorithm that generalizes many well-known paging and weighted-caching strategies, including least-recently-used, first-in-first-out, flush-when-full, and the balance algorithm. On any request sequence, the total cost incurred by the algorithm is at most k=(k \Gamma h + 1) times the mini..