Enhancement and validation of the squid cache replacement policy

benchmark, replacement policy, performance © Copyright Hewlett-Packard Company 1999 Caching in the World Wide Web has been used to enhance the scalability and performance of user access to popular web content. Caches reduce bandwidth demand, improve response times for popular objects, and help reduce the effects of so called “flash crowds”. There are several cache implementations available from software and appliance vendors as well as the Squid open source cache software. The cache replacement policy decides which objects will remain in cache and which are evicted to make space for new objects. The choice of this policy has an effect on the network bandwidth demand and object hit rate of the cache (which is related to page load time). This paper reports on the implementation and characterization of two newly proposed cache replacement policies in the Squid cache