Comparing Web Cache Implementations for Fast O(1) Updates Based on LRU, LFU and Score Gated Strategies

Abstract

To be applicable to high user request workloads, web caching strategies benefit from low implementation and update effort. In this regard, the Least Recently Used (LRU) replacement principle is a simple and widely-used method. Despite its popularity, LRU has deficits in the achieved hit rate performance and cannot consider transport and network optimization criteria for selecting content to be cached. As a result, many alternatives have been proposed in the literature, which improve the cache performance at the cost of higher complexity.In this work, we evaluate the implementation complexity and runtime performance of LRU, Least Frequently Used (LFU), and score based strategies in the class of fast $O(1)$ updates with constant effort per request. We implement Window LFU (W-LFU) within this class and show that $O(1)$ update effort can be achieved. We further compare fast update schemes of Score Gated LRU and new Score Gated Polling (SGP). SGP is simpler than LRU and provides full flexibility for arbitrary score assessment per data object as information basis for performance optimization regarding network cost and quality measures.