For example, you may notice that when you first open a web page, text appears before images. This is because text is small and takes significantly less time to download.
Caching improves and speeds up browsing. Once you download an asset, it lives on your computer for a certain amount of time. Retrieving files from your hard drive will always be faster than retrieving them from a remote server, no matter how fast your internet connection is.
Types of caches
Caching is a technique that stores a copy of a resource and serves it back when requested. When a web cache has a requested resource in its store, it intercepts the request and returns a copy of the stored resource, rather than re-fetching the resource from the original server. This achieves the following goals: it relieves the server of its workload by not having to serve all the clients itself, and it improves performance by being closer to the client. In other words, it takes less time to transmit the resource back. For a website, caching is a key component to achieving high performance. However, the cache functionality must be configured correctly, as not all resources remain identical forever: it is important that the resource is cached only until it changes, and no more.
There are several types of caches. They can be divided part time data into two main categories: shared and private caches. A shared cache is a cache that stores responses for reuse by more than one user. A private cache is intended for a single user. This page will primarily talk about browser and proxy caches, but there are also gateway caches, CDNs, reverse proxy caches, and load balancers that are deployed on web servers to improve the reliability, performance, and scalability of websites and web applications.
A typical web cache flow looks like this:
A user accesses a website.
The browser sends an HTTP request to the web cache.
If the requested object is stored in the cache, the web cache responds with the object. If the requested object is not stored in the cache, it requests the object from the origin server and sends the response to the browser.
If the object is cacheable, the web cache stores a copy of the object so that subsequent requests can be served locally from the web cache.
Caching is an important part of the Internet, making browsing and content delivery more efficient and saving time. Although the cache performs a vital task, it can appear many times and will need to be cleared.