ProWGen: a synthetic workload generation tool for simulation evaluation of web proxy caches

This paper describes the design and use of a synthetic Web proxy workload generator called ProWGen to investigate the sensitivity of Web proxy cache replacement policies to five selected Web workload characteristics. Three representative cache replacement policies are considered in the simulation study: a recency-based policy called Least-Recently-Used (LRU), a frequency-based policy called Least-Frequently-Used-with-Aging (LFU-Aging), and a size-based policy called Greedy-Dual-Size (GD-Size). Trace-driven simulations with synthetic workloads from ProWGen show the relative sensitivity of these cache replacement policies to three Web workload characteristics: the slope of the Zipf-like document popularity distribution, the degree of temporal locality in the document referencing behaviour, and the correlation (if any) between document size and document popularity. The three replacement policies are relatively insensitive to the percentage of one-timers in the workload, and to the Pareto tail index of the heavy-tailed document size distribution. Performance differences between the three cache replacement policies are also highlighted.