Measuring consistency in TTL-based caches

We propose a general modeling framework to evaluate the performance of cache consistency algorithms. In addition to the usual hit rate, we introduce the hit* rate as a consistency measure, which captures the fraction of non-stale downloads from the cache. We apply these ideas to the analysis of the fixed TTL consistency algorithm in the presence of network delays. The hit and hit* rates are evaluated when requests and updates are modeled by renewal processes. Classical results on the renewal function lead to various bounds.