The need for a unified framework for evaluating web cache replacement strategies

With the radically increasing workload on web-based systems, new and innovative methodologies have been developed over years to enhance the performance of web caching. Among them are web cache replacement strategies. Although some classifications and categorizations of these strategies have been proposed, there is not yet a methodological and coherent framework for evaluating and comparing their performances. Current benchmarking tools focus on certain factors at the expense of others. In this paper, we survey the existing efforts and attempts; aiming at a unified evaluation framework that can be used to assess various cache replacement strategies in a wider spectrum of scenarios. Such framework can help developers and users to compare and select various replacement strategies to satisfy their needs and constraints. While discussing various issues related to a multitude of cache replacement strategies, we raise some points that we think are worth to consider in developing such a benchmarking tool.