By making this tool available to the industry, CacheFlow is offering its hard-won lessons to the rest of us for free. The performance of a network cache is largely dependent upon its hit ratio, which is defined as the percentage of user requests served by the cache. The higher the hit ratio, the more effective the cache. This erroneous assumption results in test measurements that are not based on real-world cache performance. CacheFlow's Network Cache Performance Tool, downloadable from the company s Web site, will allow network administrators to measure the real-world performance of their cache.
Web pages contain multiple independent objects.
A simple page might have only 10 objects, while a rich page may contain 50 or 60 objects. Users wait for all of the objects in the page, since each object contains information. Since users requests are for entire pages, the proper cache metric is the one that takes the perspective of the user. A cache will not help a network scale if the individual product can not scale. When the load on a cache reaches a point where the cache stops responding consistently to requests, the cache has become the primary network bottleneck.