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To cache or not to cache?
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- 2849 hits Updated: 07 December 2016 Blog
What is web caching?
Types of caches
Caching: benefits and disadvantages
There are many myths about caching—for example, some people believe that HTTPS does not cache web pages—but there’s a lot of ignorance about how to use caching effectively. This article doesn’t have all the answers but it may help people learn about web caching and some of the benefits, costs and risks associated with how you use it.
A web cache (or HTTP cache) is an information technology for the temporary storage of web documents, such as HTML pages and images, to reduce bandwidth usage, server load and perceived lag.[1] Because generating web content over the internet is both slow and expensive and, in today’s fast-paced and time-constrained world, most people’s attention span barely survives one or two seconds, one of the main purposes of caching is to improve the user experience. Large responses for information can involve many roundtrips between the client and server which delays when they are available and when the browser can process them, and also incur data costs for the visitor. In other words, caching helps reduce the cost involved between when the user clicks a mouse/presses a key/taps a screen and when an “event” (such as displaying a new web page) occurs.
The ability to cache and reuse previously fetched resources is a critical part of optimising for performance. The wrong use of caching, on the other hand, can also be counter-productive as we shall discuss.
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