Centralized Web Caching

Centralized web caching means all the users access to one centralized cache, which saves all the browsing history.  When a user requests a URL through a browser, it takes the hostname component of the user and translates the hostname into an IP address.  A HTTP session is opened for respective address, and then the client requests the URL from the particular server.

In this method, the cache acts as a representative for the client; it opens a session to the server mentioned in the URL, and attempts a direct transfer to the cache.  But this centralized caching mechanism has several problems such as security issues.

Introduction

Today we live in a world where information is available at the touch of a button and the Internet has become the backbone of sharing information from anywhere in the world. As the technology grows, it requires more and more resources and depends heavily upon the Internet. As a result of this bottlenecks within Internet and other networks occur. This is where the caching concept comes in.

A web cache is a mechanism which monitors the requests sent to a web server and keeps a copy of the response. A cache consists of a set of files which can contain images, HTML Files, Scripts, etc. When a request is sent to a URL which was previously visited and the cache contains copy of the response, the response is loaded from the cache instead of the actual web server and thus reducing the network usage and possible occurrence of bottleneck. A web cache can be implemented at browser level, within proxy server or gateway device as per requirement of the User, Network administrator or Web Master. Such centralized caching systems will reduce bandwidth and help expand the network.