“Many businesses have small bandwidth lines (56k or ISDN) that
provide a shared channel to the Internet for users. A large number
of users bottlenecking into a small pipeline can quickly saturate
it. Caching Web pages at your site can improve access time for all
users. Users asking for frequently accessed pages get them directly
from your server, rather than the Internet. This will even
accelerate access times for users asking for non-cached pages as
there are fewer users actually getting information from the
Internet.”
“Controlling and logging how people in your organization or
at home are using your network has become a necessity. The
technology that lets us implement these controls is a proxy
server. If we add the ability to cache Web pages, we have a
caching proxy server, such as Squid. Squid is distributed with
nearly every Linux distribution.”