Introduction

Most Web servers host a wide range of different types of content, which together make up the Web sites and services that are offered. For example, a typical Web site will include standard Web pages (HTML files), images (GIF, JPEG or PNG files), CSS style sheets and JavaScript source files. Depending on the service offered by the Web site, the Web site is also likely to contain some personalized, custom content that is generated by applications hosted on the Web server.

The Virtual Traffic Manager’s Content Caching capability allows the Virtual Traffic Manager to identify the content that is not customized for each request and to remember (“cache”) the content. The content might be “static”, such as a file on disk on the Web server, or it may have been generated by an application running on the Web server.

When another client asks for content that the Virtual Traffic Manager has cached in its internal Web cache, the Virtual Traffic Manager can return the content directly to the client without having to forward the request to a back-end Web server.

This has the effect of reducing the load on the back-end Web servers, particularly if the Virtual Traffic Manager has detected that it can cache content generated by complex applications that consume resources on the Web server machine.