Summary: Page Replacement for General Caching Problems
Susanne Albers # Sanjeev Arora + Sanjeev Khanna #
Abstract
Caching (paging) is a well­studied problem in online al­
gorithms, usually studied under the assumption that all
pages have a uniform size and a uniform fault cost (uni­
form caching). However, recent applications related to the
web involve situations in which pages can be of di#erent
sizes and costs. This general caching problem seems more
intricate than the uniform version. In particular, the of­
fline case itself is NP­hard. Only a few results exist for the
general caching problem [8, 17]. This paper seeks to de­
velop good o#ine page replacement policies for the general
caching problem, with the hope that any insight gained here
may lead to good online algorithms. Our first main result
is that by using only a small amount of additional mem­
ory, say O(1) times the largest page size, we can obtain an
O(1)­approximation to the general caching problem. Note
that the largest page size is typically a very small fraction
of the total cache size, say 1%. Our second result is that

Source: Arora, Sanjeev - Department of Computer Science, Princeton University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences