A process providing a cache of items available on other servers which are presumably slower or more expensive to access.This term is used particularly for a World-Wide Web server which accepts URLs with a special prefix.When it receives a request for such a URL, it strips off the prefix and looks for the resulting URL in its local cache.If found, it returns the document immediately, otherwise it fetches it from the remote server, saves a copy in the cache and returns it to the requester.The cache will usually have an expiry algorithm which flushes documents according to their age, size, and access history.Compare proxy gateway.(1995-02-14)