Authors: Junbiao Zhang, Rauf Izmailov, Daniel Reininger, and Maximilian Ott
Web caching has received considerable attention in the past few years due to its effectiveness in reducing client response time and network traffic. Conventional memory caching algorithms have been proved to be insufficient in the context of web caching because of variable web document sizes and different latency scales. As such, new algorithms need to be designed and their performance tested using available web logs. Perl, with powerful text processing features and different levels of sophistication, is an ideal choice for web caching study. In this paper, we describe a web caching simulation environment written in Perl which fully takes advantage of many of the language's features to quickly prototype and gradually evolve the system. The environment, referred to as WebCASE(Web Caching Algorithm Simulation Environment), consists of an extensible simulation core and a front end graphical interface showing the running algorithm behaviors. Aggregate statistics as well as global and individual algorithm patterns can be easily and accurately obtained through WebCASE. We have been using this environment extensively in studying the performances and execution patterns of existing algorithms and in designing new and more efficient algorithms.
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