Caching web documents

All this time, we have been talking about the caching of web documents and how it helps in saving bandwidth and improving the end user experience, now it's time to learn how and where Squid actually keeps these cached documents so that they can be served on demand. Squid uses main memory (RAM) and hard disks for storing or caching the web documents.

Caching is a complex process but Squid handles it beautifully and exposes the directives using squid.conf, so that we can control how much should be cached and what should be given the highest priority while caching. Let's have a brief look at the caching-related directives provided by Squid.

Using main memory (RAM) for caching

The web documents cached in the main memory or RAM can be served very quickly as data read/write speeds of RAM are very high compared to hard disks with mechanical parts. However, as the amount of space available in RAM for caching is very low compared to the cache space available on hard disks, only...