How Web Caching Combats Network Congestion

It’s no news that the internet is a system with huge distributed information that provides access to shared data objects for billions of users across the planet. However, in recent years, there has been an exponential growth in the size of the internet, which causes network congestion.

For ISPs, this leads to bad user experience with internet performance resulting in increased demands to improve the web’s infrastructure. But expanding without any solutions will result in server overload and unacceptable service response times. To combat these issues, internet accelerator companies have come up with caching solutions that pre-fetch user details to speed up the performance of the internet.

These network acceleration technologies are a great respite for ISPs or third-party servers who can deliver high-quality content to their users at significantly lesser load times and transit costs. There are many advantages of web caching, particularly HTTP traffic, which is why ISPs across the world are opting for this internet acceleration solution:

1. Caching reduces bandwidth consumption; therefore, it decreases network traffic and diminishes network congestion

2. HTTP caching reduces access latency for two reasons:

a) Frequently accessed documents are fetched from a nearby proxy cache instead of remote data servers; therefore, the transmission delay is minimized.

b) Since, caching reduces network traffic, retrieving documents that are not cached is also comparatively faster due to lesser congestion on the network path.

    3. Caching reduces the workload of remote web servers by spreading the data widely among the proxy caches over the WAN.

In a scenario where the remote server is not available due to a crash or network partitioning, the client can obtain a cached copy at the proxy. This increases the robustness of web browsing and ISPs are able to serve their end-users with an enhanced internet experience.