Caching improves the effectiveness of congested links by reducing traffic and thereby making access faster for pages which have to be brought over the Internet. Now that charges are being introduced for trans-Atlantic traffic, a cache can also provide valuable cost benefits.
Web Caching A cache is a computer with sufficient disk space to store frequently used pages.
When someone uses a PC to acces a web page, the browser on their PC uses its proxy configuration to access pages via the cache server. Otherwise, the cache server will try to retrieve the page either from another cache server or direct from the orignal source site. PC browsers, like Netscape, have access to proxy servers and can cope with such servers being down. This means that there is both a worst case and a page-specific mechanism to ensure that people do not get out dated information. Every PC Browser to be configured Each PC on campus should have Netscape or other WWW browser configured to point to local cache server name to act as a proxy.