Caching on the World Wide Web

Abstract

With the recent explosion in usage of the World Wide Web, the problem of caching Web objects has gained considerable importance. Caching on the Web differs from traditional caching in several ways. The nonhomogeneity of the object sizes is probably the most important such difference. In this paper, we give an overview of caching policies designed specifically for Web objects and provide a new algorithm of our own. This new algorithm can be regarded as a generalization of the standard LRU algorithm. We examine the performance of this and other Web caching algorithms via event- and trace-driven simulation.