Lease caching is a new technique that provides greater control of the cache than what is allowed in conventional caches. The simplest control is uniform lease (UL), which means that all leases are identical in length. The UL cache is prescriptive and based on allocation. In comparison, a conventional cache is reactive and based on replacement. They represent two fundamentally different approaches to cache management.

This paper answers a basic question — how the baseline lease cache compares with the baseline conventional cache in particular the LRU cache. It compares the two caches both in theory and through experimentation. It shows theoretical conditions for UL and LRU to perform the same. It uses contrived examples to show when they may differ. Finally, it tests the 30 benchmarks in PolyBench to show how often they perform the same in these programs and when they differ, what is the precise reason for the difference.