Evaluating a new approach to strong web cache consistency with snapshots of collected content

The problem of Web cache consistency continues to be an important one. Current Web caches use heuristic-based policies for determining the freshness of cached objects, often forcing content providers to unnecessarily mark their content as uncacheable simply to retain control over it. Server-driven invalidation has been proposed as a mechanism for providing strong cache consistency for Web objects, but it requires servers to maintain per-client state even for infrequently changing objects. We propose an alternative approach to strong cache consistency, called MONARCH, which does not require servers to maintain per-client state. In this work we focus on a new approach for evaluation of MONARCH in comparison with current practice and other cache consistency policies. This approach uses snapshots of content collected from real Web sites as input to a simulator. Results of the evaluation show MONARCH generates little more request traffic than an optimal cache coherency policy.