What are the hardware requirements of a web caching server?
Web caching servers have varying hardware requirements. Before making a decision as to which caching server to implement it may be advisable to compare the hardware requirements of various vendors. There are some common baselines however. The primary task of a caching server is to store items and to retrieve them for ulterior delivery. Disk I/O is therefore of paramount importance, and pure CPU power is secondary. It is critical to choose the fastest hard disk available for the hardware configuration to be used, both in terms of access time and data throughput. Also, the larger the hard disk the better. The more disk space there is, the longer cached items can be kept, and the less frequently they need to be refreshed from the originating server. If the disk is full, the caching server will be required to discard old items to make room for new ones. These items may be discarded while they are still fresh. With adequate disk space this will happen less often and performance gains will b
