On the cooperation of Web clients and proxy caches

Web proxy cache has become universal to the Internet´s infrastructure. It reduces the time to deliver content and the demand on the costly external network bandwidth. The wide employment of Web proxy caches creates an illusion that they are functioning well. In this paper, we show that there is a mismatch in the expiration policies of clients and proxy caches. This causes many redundant requests that are sent through the network. We also argue that sending requests of uncachable objects to a cache is inappropriate and suggest a solution for the problem. This work suggests that Web clients and proxy caches today are not cooperating most effectively, and improvements are necessary and possible.