Can Caching Tame the Web?
The year has already proven prolific for new Web caching technologies, designed to store copies of Web pages closer to users and rein in network traffic loads. And depending on who you listen to, the technology is either imperative to the health of the Web – or merely a limited fix for the network’s ongoing, unstoppable bulge. “We’re dealing with the beginnings of the performance problem,” said Kelly Herrell, vice president of marketing at CacheFlow, maker of a two-month old Web caching device for company networks and Internet service providers. “If we don’t install caches, the Web will fail to work. It will get bogged down, and users will not get a response.” Vendors are promoting new and improved approaches to Web caching, most notably in the form of dedicated devices like CacheFlow’s, whose hardware, operating system, and software are all built exclusively to cache Web content. The caching of digital information has already proven successful in the design of computer motherboards, o
