A caching system includes a caching profile that records a file identifier and an entry time for each file that enters the caching system, and a predictive modeling engine that analyzes the profile to determine metrics for members of a set of caching algorithms. The metrics may be measures of clustering or scattering of the file identities entering the caching system. The algorithm with the most favorable metric is selected as the preferred caching algorithm, and the file is processed according to the preferred algorithm. In one embodiment of the invention, the set of caching algorithms includes a most-used caching algorithm, a least-used caching algorithm, a most-recently-used caching algorithm, and a least-recently-used caching algorithm.