The next two days were dedicated to running the benchmark. Wessels is building and integrating the code as a worldwide collaboration, and puts it into public trust. Squid has been constantly evolving since 1996, and includes many features not found in commercial caching products. Since the tested caches differ a lot, it is tempting to draw conclusions about participants based on a single performance graph or pricing table. In addition, manageability, reliability, and correctness are very important attributes that should be considered in any buying decisions.
Most customers also have to consider price in their decision making process.
The report summarizes the pricing of the participating products and gives detailed product configurations. Because it was the first truly independent benchmark of network caches, we believe it will be of tremendous value to the industry. The second Web Cache Bakeoff has been tentatively scheduled for six months from now, in early autumn of 1999. With the exponential growth of World Wide Web traffic, Web caching will be an important component of industrial strength Web infrastructures.