The Net Experience Caching products provide an effective way to make Web users happier by cutting the time it takes for them to load frequently accessed Web pages. They also help relieve network congestion and make it possible to postpone expensive hardware purchases. By Charles H. Trepper s more users inundate Web servers all over the world, caching products and content-delivery services that boost the secure delivery of Web pages continue to proliferate. Caching can be a great way to make users happier by decreasing the time they have to wait for Web pages to load on their browsers. However, caching works only for frequently requested pages, and only a small percentage of the total number of pages on the Web are requested often enough to make caching them worthwhile.
Many users request the same popular pages and objects.
This page may be requested millions of times a day, which creates heavy server demand and a lot of network traffic, increasing page load times. A cache is a dedicated set of hardware and software that monitors Web content and object requests and stores them after retrieving them from a server. When the same content and objects are requested again, the cache delivers the object from its storage rather than passing the request to the Web server. This speeds up content delivery and response time while reducing the Web server's workload. Web objects change over time, so each object has a limited life span.