Emulating Web cache replacement algorithms versus a real system

This paper presents a powerful framework to simulate Web proxy cache systems. Our tool provides a comfortable environment to simulate and explore cache management techniques. It also includes an extension to design and simulate new structures considering several inter-connected caches which are very convenient for our current research projects. Besides a statistics module is enlarged to obtain supplementary performance measures. We compared the results obtained from our framework against a commercial proxy cache system by using several replacement algorithms and input traces. Experimental results show that proxy cache hit ratio deviations fall very close to the real system, since them never exceeds 3.5%. Although the simulation time varies depending on the input trace size and the modeled management technique, in all experiments run time has been by about several hundred times faster than the time the real system takes.