suring the Byte Hit Ratio, overlapping the results of
different replacement algorithms. As a consequence,
we can affirm that there is a group of algorithms that
achieves similar performance when considering the
Byte Hit Ratio metric. This result is opposite to most
of the published conclusions in the literature, where
an algorithm achieves the best performance among
the evaluated algorithms. On the other hand, the re-
sults measuring the Hit Ratio metric have a narrow
confidence interval allowing to select the best replace-
ment algorithm for the workload used.
The remainder of this paper is organized as fol-
lows. Section 2 describes the related work in
Web-Proxy server cache evaluations. Section 3 de-
scribes the experimental environment used. Section 4
presents the evaluation of the Web-Proxy server cache
replacement algorithms, and analyzes the experimen-
tal results. Finally, Section 5 presents some conclud-
ing remarks.
2 RELATED WORK
The most commonly evaluation technique used in
Web-Proxy cache evaluation studies is the trace-
driven simulation using a captured log as a workload
(Wooster and Abrams, 1997), (Cao and Irani, 1997),
(Arlitt et al., 1998), (Arlitt et al., 1999), (Jin and
Bestavros, 2000), (Bahn et al., 2002). Few of them
(Arlitt et al., 1998), (Arlitt et al., 1999) include in their
evaluation methodology a warming-phase, only one
of them (Wooster and Abrams, 1997) provides results
using confidence intervals, and none of them provides
results in both conditions. These studies use the HR
and the BHR metrics to compare and to evaluate the
performance of the proposed replacement algorithms.
The HR indicates how efficient a Web-Proxy server is,
and the BHR indicates how much of the total amount
of bytes requested are served from the cache (i.e., how
much traffic volume can be saved). On the other hand,
time-related metrics are seldom used due to the diffi-
culty when modeling accurately the penalty time for
the Internet accesses. This section briefly describes
these works.
Cao and Irani (Cao and Irani, 1997) propose the
GreedyDual-Size (GDS) replacement algorithm us-
ing a large set of captured logs with a restriction of
two million requests in each simulation. The GDS is
an extended version of the GreedyDual algorithm that
incorporates the object size, setting a cost/size value
for each object in the cache. They perform a trace
preprocessing discarding the log entries with a 304
HTTP response-code. Therefore, the simulation re-
sults could not reflect the current performance of the
replacement algorihtms because the log entries dis-
carded represent a large amount of the total of log en-
tries. Their proposal achieves the best performance
for the three metrics measured (the HR, the BHR, and
the Reduced Latency).
Arlitt et al. (Arlitt et al., 1998) (Arlitt et al.,
1999) propose and evaluate two formula-based re-
placement algorithms: Greedy-Dual Size Frequency
(GDSF) and the Least Frequently Used with Dynamic
Aging (LFUDA) using a single captured log of three
months length. The GDSF keeps the smaller size
popular requested objects in the cache (a smaller size
object has higher probability of being frequently re-
quested). On the other hand, the LFUDA keeps the
most popular objects in the cache, regardless of their
size. Both algorithms incorporate an aging mecha-
nism to avoid the cache pollution. The HR is cal-
culated considering the un-cacheable log entries as
misses and including the 304 status responde-code log
entries; and the BHR is calculated using only the logs
containing the object size information. The authors
provide results for the HR and the BHR metrics using
a warming phase of three weeks; but no confidence in-
tervals are shown. Their results show that size-based
policies (i.e., the GDSF) achieve a better HR, and that
frequency-based policies (i.e, LFUDA) obtain a bet-
ter BHR. Both algorithms are currently implemented
in the Squid Proxy Cache (Squid, 2005).
Jin and Bestravos (Jin and Bestavros, 2000) pro-
pose the GreedyDual-Size Popularity (GDSP) algo-
rithm, and evaluate it using two captured logs (with
approximately four million requests in each log). The
GDSP uses an eviction mechanism similar to the
GDSF. They use the same trace prepocessing to dis-
card the log entries of Cao and Irani but they esti-
mate a penalty time for each log entry (simbolizing
an object transmission from the Web-Server) using a
mathematical formula, which does not consider the
benefits of the current HTTP/1.1 protocol (i.e., per-
sistent connections) (Fielding et al., 1999). The pa-
rameters of this mathematical formula are estimated
using a least-square fit. In the evaluation, the pro-
posed GDSP presents the best results for the HR, the
BHR and the Latency Saving Ratio metrics.
Bahn et al. (Bahn et al., 2002) propose the
Least Unified-Value (LUV) replacement algorithm
and compare it against a large set of replacement algo-
rithms using two captured logs with a small amount of
requests. For this purpose, the experiments consider
small cache sizes, unrealistic in the actual Web-Proxy
server caches. The main drawback of this study is the
trace preprocessing required to adjust a parameter by
the eviction mechanism. In spite of this disadvantage,
they conclude that the implementation is efficient in
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