Improving Performance on WWW using Intelligent Predictive Caching for Web Proxy Servers

Web proxy caching is used to improve the performance of the Web infrastructure. It aims to reduce network traffic, server load, and user perceived retrieval delays. The heart of a caching system is its page replacement policy, which needs to make good replacement decisions when its cache is full and a new document needs to be stored. The latest and most popular replacement policies like GDSF and GDSF# use the file size, access frequency, and age in the decision process. The effectiveness of any replacement policy can be evaluated using two metrics: hit ratio (HR) and byte hit ratio (BHR). There is always a trade-off between HR and BHR [1]. In this paper, using three different Web proxy server logs, we use trace driven analysis to evaluate the effects of different replacement policies on the performance of a Web proxy server. We propose a modification of GDSF# policy, IPGDSF#. Our simulation results show that our proposed replacement policy IPGDSF# performs better than several policies proposed in the literature in terms of hit rate as well as byte hit rate.