Improvement of the neural network proxy cache replacement strategy

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 help decrease bandwidth, 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. In this paper we propose an improved strategy of NNPCR referred to as NNPCR-2. 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.