Web object-based storage management in proxy caches

Proxy caches are essential to improve the performance of the World Wide Web and to enhance user perceived latency. Appropriate cache management strategies are crucial to achieve these goals. In our previous work, we have introduced Web object-based caching policies. A Web object consists of the main HTML page and all of its constituent embedded files. Our studies have shown that these policies improve proxy cache performance substantially.In this paper, we propose a new Web object-based policy to manage the storage system of a proxy cache. We propose two techniques to improve the storage system performance. The first technique is concerned with prefetching the related files belonging to a Web object, from the disk to main memory. This prefetching improves performance as most of the files can be provided from the main memory rather than from the proxy disk. The second technique stores the Web object members in contiguous disk blocks in order to reduce the disk access time. We used trace-driven simulations to study the performance improvements one can obtain with these two techniques. Our results show that the first technique by itself provides up to 50% reduction in hit latency, which is the delay involved in providing a hit document by the proxy. An additional 5% improvement can be obtained by incorporating the second technique.     

Proxy Cache Replacement Algorithms: A History-Based Approach

Accesing and circulation of Web objects has been facilitated by the design and implementation of effective caching schemes. Web caching has been integrated in prototype and commercial Web-based information systems in order to reduce the overall bandwidth and increase system's fault tolerance. This paper presents an overview of a series of Web cache replacement algorithms based on the idea of preserving a history record for cached Web objects. The number of references to Web objects over a certain time period is a critical parameter for the cache content replacement. The proposed algorithms are simulated and experimented under a real workload of Web cache traces provided by a major (Squid) proxy cache server installation. Cache and bytes hit rates are given with respect to different cache sizes and a varying number of request workload sets and it is shown that the proposed cache replacement algorithms improve both cache and byte hit rates.     

Web cache management based on the expected cost of web objects

With the recent explosion in usage of the World Wide Web, Web caching has become increasingly important. However, due to the non-uniform cost/size property of data objects in this environment, design of an efficient caching algorithm becomes an even more difficult problem compared to the traditional caching problems. In this paper, we propose the Least Expected Cost (LEC) replacement algorithm for Web caches that provides a simple and robust framework for the estimation of reference probability and fair evaluation of non-uniform Web objects. LEC evaluates a Web object based on its cost per unit size multiplied by the estimated reference probability of the object. This results in a normalized assessment of the contribution to the cost-savings ratio, leading to a fair replacement algorithm. We show that this normalization method finds optimal solution under some assumptions. Trace-driven simulations with actual Web cache logs show that LEC offers the performance of caches more than twice its size compared with other algorithms we considered. Nevertheless, it is simple, having no parameters to tune. We also show how the algorithm can be effectively implemented as a Web cache replacement module.     

Web proxy cache replacement scheme based on back-propagation neural network

Web proxy caches are used to reduce the strain of contemporary web traffic on web servers and network bandwidth providers. In this research, a novel approach to web proxy cache replacement which utilizes neural networks for replacement decisions is developed and analyzed. Neural networks are trained to classify cacheable objects from real world data sets using information known to be important in web proxy caching, such as frequency and recency. Correct classification ratios between 0.85 and 0.88 are obtained both for data used for training and data not used for training. Our approach is compared with Least Recently Used (LRU), Least Frequently Used (LFU) and the optimal case which always rates an object with the number of future requests. Performance is evaluated in simulation for various neural network structures and cache conditions. The final neural networks achieve hit rates that are 86.60% of the optimal in the worst case and 100% of the optimal in the best case. Byte-hit rates are 93.36% of the optimal in the worst case and 99.92% of the optimal in the best case. We examine the input-to-output mappings of individual neural networks and analyze the resulting caching strategy with respect to specific cache conditions.     

A neural network proxy cache replacement strategy and its implementation in the Squid proxy server

As the Internet has become a more central aspect for information technology, so have concerns with supplying enough bandwidth and serving web requests to end users in an appropriate time frame. Web caching was introduced in the 1990s to help decrease network traffic, lessen user perceived lag, and reduce loads on origin servers by storing copies of web objects on servers closer to end users as opposed to forwarding all requests to the origin servers. Since web caches have limited space, web caches must effectively decide which objects are worth caching or replacing for other objects. This problem is known as cache replacement. We used neural networks to solve this problem and proposed the Neural Network Proxy Cache Replacement (NNPCR) method. The goal of this research is to implement NNPCR in a real environment like Squid proxy server. In order to do so, we propose an improved strategy of NNPCR referred to as NNPCR-2. We show how the improved model can be trained with up to twelve times more data and gain a 5–10% increase in Correct Classification Ratio (CCR) than NNPCR. We implemented NNPCR-2 in Squid proxy server and compared it with four other cache replacement strategies. In this paper, we use 84 times more data than NNPCR was tested against and present exhaustive test results for NNPCR-2 with different trace files and neural network structures. Our results demonstrate that NNPCR-2 made important, balanced decisions in relation to the hit rate and byte hit rate; the two performance metrics most commonly used to measure the performance of web proxy caches.     

基于高斯混合模型的Web代理服务器缓存替换策略

Web代理服务器缓存能够在一定程度上解决用户访问延迟和网络拥塞问题,Web代理缓存的缓存替换策略直接影响缓存的命中率,从而影响网络请求响应的效果;为此,使用一种通过固定大小的循环滑动窗口提取Web日志数据的多项特征,并使用高斯混合模型对Web日志数据进行聚类分析,预测在窗口时间内可能再次访问到Web对象,结合最近最少使用(LRU)算法,提出一种新的基于高斯混合模型的Web代理服务器缓存替换策略;实验结果表明,与传统的缓存替换策略LRU、LFU、FIFO、GDSF相比,该策略有效提高了Web代理缓存的请求命中率和字节命中率。     

Evolutionary Techniques for Web Caching

Web caching has been proposed as an effective solution to the problems of network traffic and congestion, Web objects access and Web load balancing. This paper presents a model for optimizing Web cache content by applying either a genetic algorithm or an evolutionary programming scheme for Web cache content replacement. Three policies are proposed for each of the genetic algorithm and the evolutionary programming techniques, in relation to objects staleness factors and retrieval rates. A simulation model is developed and long term trace-driven simulation is used to experiment on the proposed techniques. The results indicate that all evolutionary techniques are beneficial to the cache replacement, compared to the conventional replacement applied in most Web cache server. Under an appropriate objective function the genetic algorithm has been proven to be the best of all approaches with respect to cache hit and byte hit ratios.     

Exploiting client caches to build large Web caches

New demands brought by the continuing growth of the Internet will be met in part by more effective and comprehensive use of caching. This paper proposes to exploit client browser caches in the context of cooperative proxy caching by constructing the client caches within each organization (e.g., corporate networks) as a peer-to-peer (P2P) client cache. Via trace-driven simulations we evaluate the potential performance benefit of cooperative proxy caching with/without exploiting client caches. We show that exploiting client caches in cooperative proxy caching can significantly improve performance, particularly when the size of individual proxy caches is limited compared to the universe of Web objects. We further devise a cooperative hierarchical greedy-dual replacement algorithm (Hier-GD), which not only provides some cache coordination but also utilizes client caches. Through Hier-GD, we explore the design issues of how to exploit client caches in cooperative proxy caching to build large Web caches. We show that Hier-GD is technically practical and can potentially improve the performance of cooperative proxy caching by utilizing client caches.

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, a frequency-based policy called least-frequently-used-with-aging, and a size-based policy called greedy-dual-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.     

Neuro-fuzzy system in partitioned client-side Web cache

This paper proposes a novel contribution in Web caching area, especially in Web cache replacement, so-called intelligent client-side Web caching scheme (ICWCS). This approach is developed by splitting the client-side cache into two caches: short-term cache that receives the Web objects from the Internet directly, and long-term cache that receives the Web objects from the short-term cache. The objects in short-term cache are removed by least recently used (LRU) algorithm as short-term cache is full. More significantly, when the long-term cache saturates, the neuro-fuzzy system is employed efficiently in managing contents of the long-term cache. The proposed solution is validated by implementing trace-driven simulation and the results are compared with least recently used (LRU) and least frequently used (LFU) algorithms; the most common policies of evaluating Web caching performance. The simulation results have revealed that the proposed approach improves the performance of Web caching in terms of hit ratio (HR), up to 14.8% and 17.9% over LRU and LFU. In terms of byte hit ratio (BHR), the Web caching performance is improved up to 2.57% and 26.25%, and for latency saving ratio (LSR), the performance is better with 8.3% and 18.9% over LRU and LFU, respectively.     

Web对象访问特征模拟器的设计与实现

Web缓存是一个提高Web性能非常有效的方法，它可以位于网络的不同位置：客户端，代理服务器端，服务器端。研究表明Web缓存命中率可以达到30％-50％。Web缓存在应用中最大的问题就是Web缓存管理，研究Web访问特征是有效进行Web缓存管理的基础。Web日志生成模拟器对于研究Web缓存系统有很大地帮助，目前有两种方法模拟生成Web访问日志：日志驱动方法，数学模拟方法。日志驱动方法利用对历史日志进行变换来模拟生成新的日志，数学模拟方法在充分研究Ⅵ协对象访问特征的基础上，通过建立数学模型来模拟生成Web日志。该文通过分析Web对象访问特征，采用数学模拟方法分别模拟了Web对象高频区及低频区流行度特征，Web对象大小重尾分布特征，Web访问的时间局部性特征；设计并实现了一个Web日志模拟生成器WEBSIM。该模拟器不仅可以模拟生成Web对象访问日志，而且具有较大的灵活性，为进一步研究Web缓存技术和预取技术提供依据。     

基于比例命中率的Web缓存区分服务

基于反馈控制理论,通过系统辨识设计了缓存控制器。动态调整不同类别缓存对象的缓存空间,可保证高优先级Web对象的高命中率,而不同类别的Web对象命中率之比保持不变。在服务器端实现了基于比例命中率的缓存区分服务。经实验验证,在GDSF,LRU,LFU缓存替换算法下,无论是请求命中率还是字节命中率,均有良好的区分效果。     

基于谱聚类的Web多级缓存替换策略

服务器缓存性能的核心是缓存替换策略, 缓存替换策略直接影响缓存的命中率, Web缓存可以解决网络拥塞和用户访问延迟问题, 提高服务器的性能. 传统缓存替换算法的命中率往往不高, 为此文中提出了一种基于谱聚类的多级缓存替换策略. 该策略利用循环滑动窗口机制提取日志文件的多项时序特征和访问属性, 通过谱聚类对过滤后的数据集进行聚类分析从而得到访问预测结果. 多级缓存替换策略综合考虑了缓存对象的局部频率、全局频率以及资源大小能更好地对低价值资源进行剔除, 同时对高价值资源进行保留. 通过与传统替换算法LRU、LFU、RC、FIFO进行实验对比, 实验结果表明本文将谱聚类和多级缓存替换策略进行结合有效地提高了缓存请求命中率和字节命中率.     

An expiration age-based document placement scheme for cooperative Web caching

The sharing of caches among proxies is an important technique to reduce Web traffic, alleviate network bottlenecks, and improve response time of document requests. Most existing work on cooperative caching has been focused on serving misses collaboratively. Very few have studied the effect of cooperation on document placement schemes and its potential enhancements on cache hit ratio and latency reduction. We propose a new document placement scheme which takes into account the contentions at individual caches in order to limit the replication of documents within a cache group and increase document hit ratio. The main idea of this new scheme is to view the aggregate disk space of the cache group as a global resource of the group and uses the concept of cache expiration age to measure the contention of individual caches. The decision of whether to cache a document at a proxy is made collectively among the caches that already have a copy of this document. We refer to this new document placement scheme as the Expiration Age-based scheme (EA scheme). The EA scheme effectively reduces the replication of documents across the cache group, while ensuring that a copy of the document always resides in a cache where it is likely to stay for the longest time. We report our study on the potentials and limits of the EA scheme using both analytic modeling and trace-based simulation. The analytical model compares and contrasts the existing (ad hoc) placement scheme of cooperative proxy caches with our new EA scheme and indicates that the EA scheme improves the effectiveness of aggregate disk usage, thereby increasing the average time duration for which documents stay in the cache. The trace-based simulations show that the EA scheme yields higher hit rates and better response times compared to the existing document placement schemes used in most of the caching proxies.     

一种有效的Web代理缓存替换算法

设计良好的Web缓存替换策略能使网络上的资源得到最有效的利用。文章设计了一个较有效率的Web缓存替换策略LFRU，期望以较佳的方式获得网络资源及改善Web缓存的性能和服务质量。实验结果表明该策略有较高的文档命中率和字节命中率。     

基于网络性能的智能Web加速技术——缓存与预取

Web业务在网络业务中占有很大比重,在无法扩大网络带宽时,需要采取一定技术合理利用带宽,改善网络性能。研究了基于RTT（round trip time)等网络性能指标的Web智能加速技术,在对Web代理服务器上的业务进行分析和对网络RTT进行测量分析的基础上,提出了智能预取控制技术及新的缓存（cache）替换方法。对新算法的仿真研究表明,该方法提高了缓存的命中率。研究表明预取技术在不明显增加网络负荷的前提下,提高了业务的响应速度,有效地改进了Web访问性能。     

Refreshment policies for Web content caches

Web content caches are often placed between end users and origin servers as a mean to reduce server load, network usage, and ultimately, user-perceived latency. Cached objects typically have associated expiration times, after which they are considered stale and must be validated with a remote server (origin or another cache) before they can be sent to a client. A considerable fraction of cache “hits” involve stale copies that turned out to be current. These validations of current objects have small message size, but nonetheless, often induce latency comparable to full-fledged cache misses. Thus, the functionality of caches as a latency-reducing mechanism highly depends not only on content availability but also on its freshness. We propose policies for caches to proactively validate selected objects as they become stale, and thus allow for more client requests to be processed locally. Our policies operate within the existing protocols and exploit natural properties of request patterns such as frequency and recency. We evaluated and compared different policies using trace-based simulations.     

利用ZIPF定律建立有效的WEB对象缓存机制

通过对Web通信量的分析,人们发现用户对Web对象的访问模式服从Zipf定律或类Zipf定律。在Web缓存的设计中,为得到所期望的Web对象命中率的要求,设计人员可以根据Zipf定律近似计算出相应的缓存大小。因此,Zipf定律为Web缓存结构的设计提供了重要的依据。适当的缓存大小结合P-LFU替换策略可以得到很高的Web缓存命中率。     

Segmentation of multimedia streams for proxy caching

Proxy caching of large multimedia objects on the edge of the Internet has become increasingly important for reducing network latency. For a large media object, such as a two-hour video, treating the whole media as a single object for caching is not appropriate. In this paper, we study three media segmentation approaches to proxy caching: fixed, pyramid, and skyscraper. Blocks of a media stream are grouped into various segments for cache management. The cache admission and replacement policies attach different caching priorities to individual segments, taking into account the access frequency of the media object and the segment distance from the start of the media. These caching policies give preferential treatment to the beginning segments. As such, most user requests can be quickly played back from the proxy servers without delay. Event-driven simulations are conducted to evaluate the segmentation approaches and compare them with whole media caching. The results show that: 1) compared with whole media caching, segmentation-based caching is more effective not only in increased byte-hit ratio but also in lowered fraction of requests that requires delayed start; 2) pyramid segmentation, where segment size increases exponentially, is the best segmentation approach; and 3) segmentation-based caching is especially advantageous when the cache size is limited, when the set of hot media objects changes over time, when the media file size is large, and when there are a large number of distinct media objects.     

基于NB分类器重访概率预测的Web缓存替换策略

Web缓存是用来解决网络访问延迟和网络拥塞问题，缓存替换策略直接影响缓存的命中率。为此，提出一种朴素贝叶斯（NB）分类器重访概率预测的Web缓存替换策略；根据用户之前访问日志，通过分区操作提取多项特征来表示每次访问的对象，并构建特征数据集；训练NB分类器，用来确定缓存中对象被再次访问的概率，为对象分配权重；结合LRU策略来合理删除一些对象。仿真结果表明，提出的策略在保证较高命中率的同时有效降低了执行时间。