Performance comparison studies are primarily carried out through real systems or simulation environments. Simulation is the most commonly used method to explore new proposals due to both its flexibility and the relatively reduced time taken to obtain performance results. This paper presents a framework to simulate web proxy cache systems. Our tool provides a comfortable environment to simulate and explore cache management techniques.

In order to validate our framework and show how accurate it executes, a performance comparison has been done. We analyzed the details of a commercial proxy cache system and compare its results with those obtained from our simulator using the most commonly replacement algorithm (LRU). For this purpose, the proposed environment was adapted to match the performance of the real proxy cache. Experimental results show that proxy cache hit ratio deviations fall very close to the real system, since them never exceeds 3.42%.