What is a web cache?
Since the earliest days of the World Wide Web, web browsers have used caches (proxies/ proxy server) to store recently viewed images and web pages on disk. On subsequent visits to the web page, the browser looks to see if the pages have been modified since the last visit, and if they have not, the pages are instead retrieved from disk. This brings benefits to the user, in that the browser can rapidly display recently visited sites. It also reduces network traffic, and will significantly speed up access to popular web sites (e.g. search engines, Netscape’s homepage, Microsoft’s homepage, etc). Although the local cache works well, it is very inefficient, in that it only caches documents requested by an individual user. It is far more sensible to have one cache for many users. The University has invested in two machines to act as a central web cache. This cache may be accessed by virtually all types of web browsers on a variety of operating systems. All that is required is a minor change
