although the toy app I wrote to generate a 500MB trace
file doesn't use MVCC in an essential way (some of the
MVCC simulation code is nevertheless exercised, since
an invalidation of current data in the presence of MVCC
always creates a cache record for the newly non-current
revision).

Still puzzling over what to do when the trace file records
a load hit but the simulated cache gets a miss.  The
old simulation code seemed to assume that a store for the same
oid would show up in the trace file next, and it could get
the info it needed about the missing object from the store
trace.  But that isn't true:  precisely because the load was
a hit in the trace file, the object isn't going to be stored
again "soon" in the trace file.

Here are some actual-vs-simulated hit rate results, for a
20MB cache, with a trace file covering about 9 million
loads, over 3 ZEO client (re)starts:

actual   simulated
------   ---------
  93.1        92.7
  79.8        79.0
  68.0        69.1
      
  81.4        81.1  overall

Since the simulated hit rates are both higher and lower
than the actual hit rates, that argues against a gross
systematic bias in the simulation (although there may
be several systematic biases in opposite directions).