Popularity-aware greedy dual-size Web proxy caching algorithms

Web caching aims at reducing network traffic, server load and user-perceived retrieval delays by replicating popular content on proxy caches that are strategically placed within the network. While key to effective cache utilization, popularity information (e.g. relative access frequencies of objects requested through a proxy) is seldom incorporated directly in cache replacement algorithms. Rather other properties of the request stream (e.g. temporal locality and content size), which are easier to capture in an online fashion, are used to indirectly infer popularity information, and hence drive cache replacement policies. Recent studies suggest that the correlation between these secondary properties and popularity is weakening due in part to the prevalence of efficient client and proxy caches. This trend points to the need for proxy cache replacement algorithms that directly capture popularity information. We present an on-line algorithm that effectively captures and maintains an accurate popularity profile of Web objects requested through a caching proxy. We propose a novel cache replacement policy that uses such information to generalize the well-known greedy dual-size algorithm, and show the superiority of our proposed algorithm by comparing it to a host of recently-proposed and widely-used algorithms using extensive trace-driven simulations and a variety of performance metrics.