Web Caching

Why Cache the Web?

The short answer is that caching saves money. It saves time as well, which is sometimes the same thing if you believe that “time is money.” But how does caching save you money?

It does so by providing a more efficient mechanism for distributing information on the Web. Consider an example from our physical world: the distribution of books. Specifically, think about how a book gets from publisher to consumer. Publishers print the books and sell them, in large quantities, to wholesale distributors. The distributors, in turn, sell the books in smaller quantities to bookstores. Consumers visit the stores and purchase individual books. On the Internet, web caches are analogous to the bookstores and wholesale distributors.

The analogy is not perfect, of course. Books cost money; web pages (usually) don’t. Books are physical objects, whereas web pages are just electronic and magnetic signals. It’s difficult to copy a book, but trivial to copy electronic data.

The point is that both caches and bookstores enable efficient distribution of their respective contents. An Internet without caches is like a world without bookstores. Imagine 100,000 residents of Los Angeles each buying one copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from the publisher in New York. Now imagine 50,000 Internet users in Australia each downloading the Yahoo! home page every time they access it. It’s much more efficient to transfer the page once, cache it, and then serve future requests directly ...