Squirrel is a distributed hash table (DHT) web cache system designed to share the web caches of participating users. When a user requests a file, Squirrel contacts the member of a DHT who should be the owner of that file, and gets it from that member (referred to as home-store). Alternately, it can lookup, from that "owning" member, and return a list of other users who have recently downloaded the file, and get it from them (referred to as directory-store).