Trial Version, Competitive Info, Success Stories, etc. In other words, the overwhelming majority of traffic on the Internet comes from relatively few, but extremely popular, sites. If the contents of these sites were cached in various locations around the world, access times could be significantly increased for users across the globe. The access patterns of individual organizations and workgroups within organizations is also repetitive in nature. Workgroups tend to share similar responsibilities and interests, and therefore need access to similar sets of information.
Corporate intranets are thus another ideal environment for caching shared content.
The Power of Caching Without the aid of caching, web server performance is inadequate for most web server applications. Web servers quickly become the system bottleneck, with slow response times as the most common ailment. When slow performance is combined with the growing demand for web services, most web servers quickly run out of steam. To give you an idea of the power of caching, we measured the performance of a web server system before and after caching was applied. We started with a Sun Ultra Enterprise 3000 system running Netscape Enterprise Server 2.5 web server software, including Sun's Solaris Internet Server Supplement.