A web proxy cache is surprisingly easy to implement and maintain, and when built using open-source software it can be quite economical as well. Bandwidth on a corporate Internet connection is a valuable and often critical business resource, and in most cases is also fairly expensive. Unfortunately, even for small and medium sized companies that precious lifeline can become consumed by Web traffic from the company's own internal systems. This leads to a slow and unresponsive connection during peak work hours. Visits by multiple individuals to hot sites leads to inefficiencies, because each client browser must use the relatively slow corporate Internet connection to fetch the same data.
Popular browsers help to reduce inefficiencies by locally caching Web objects.
This locally reduces demand and increases performance, but browser caches aren't shared across an enterprise. The implementation of a web proxy cache can save additional bandwidth. Instead of sending requests for Web pages directly to origin servers on the Internet, browsers instead contact a web proxy cache server on the local high-speed network, which in turn contacts the origin server on behalf of the browser. The proxy fetches the object from the Internet and forwards it back to the browser, but also keeps a copy for itself. Subsequent requests for the same object from any browser in the enterprise won't require a visit to the origin server.