In Round 3, Squid earned the top spot with a cache age of 24.4 hours, with six other products posting cache age measurements of more than 20 hours. In Round 2, the Swell Tsunami came in first at 19.1 hours. Additionally, there were 13 products ranked between 10 and 20 hours in Round 3, compared with only three products on that level in the previous round. On the low end, IBM's 230 posted a 2.1-hour cache age for Round 3, while the Stratacache Flyer 100 had the low mark of 1.2 hours in Round 2. These artificial delays model WAN and server-side latencies, increasing the number of concurrent virtual sessions in the cache.
Polygraph then measures how long it takes a proxy to process a request.
The lower the measurement, the better the cache's performance. The improvements in response times over time is not as drastic as demonstrated in the other TMF measurements. The average in Round 3 was 1.6 seconds compared with 1.7 seconds in the latest round. Lucent's WebCache 50, which scored a 1.36- second response time rating. However, Round 3 participants fared much better than their counterparts on the low end, as the worst response time recorded for the third set of tests was IBM's eServer xSeries 230, at 1.99 seconds, compared with the Round 2 low contender, InfoLibria's DynaCache 30i at 3.08 seconds.