Abstract

The World-Wide Web continues its remarkable and seemingly unregulated growth. This growth has seen a corresponding increase in network loads and user response times. One common approach for improving the retrieval rate of large, distributed documents is via caching. In this paper, we present a caching algorithm that flexibly adapt its parameters to the hit rates and access patterns of users requesting documents. The algorithm is derived from an analysis of user accesses in a WWW database. In particular, the analysis is based upon a model from psychological research on human memory, which has long studied retrieval of memory items based on frequency and recency rates of past item occurrences. Results show that the model predicts document access with a high degree of accuracy. Furthermore, the model indicates that a caching algorithm based upon the recency rates of prior document access will reliably handle future document requests. The algorithm presented is simple, robust, and easily i...

Citations