An Applicative Study of Zipf’s Law on Web Cache

Studying the Web access characteristics is the foundation of managing Web cache efficiently. In order to get the characteristics of the Web system, it is for sure that the time interval during which measurements are made should be large enough. Many studies have demonstrated that Zipf’s law governs many features of the WWW and can be used to describe the popularity of the Web objects. In this paper, we model the Web object popularity based on the Zipf-like law, discuss the stability concept of the Web system, which means how long the time interval will be so that the measured object popularities are reliable and calculate an upper bound for the minimum length of the request stream by the use of Zip-like law. Zipf-like law holds the promise of more effective design and use of Web cache resources.