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by NovaX 898 days ago
Those guarantees are also what makes the algorithm exploitable and inflexible to handle unknown or adversary workloads. Your LRU example suffers in scan / loop / zigzag patterns, which the author's policies do poorly at as well. They target CDNs workloads where that can be ignored there due to its scale, but that is not a generalizable assumption for other workloads where it more common like databases, search, and analytics.

If the algorithm is known and accepts user facing requests then it becomes a target. A client can use the network speed of a dialup modem to bring down a modern server simply by crafting a request pattern to exploit hash flooding. This is why you generally want some injected noise, adaptivity, and use an algorithm that offers robustly good hit rates. A specialized policy that is superior in a narrow set of workload is still very useful when targeted at an expensive problem, but that's a design assumption that few can reasonably make.