A temporary storage area for frequently-accessed or recently-accessed studies. Having studies stored in the web cache speeds up the querying for studies and viewing images.
A Web cache fills requests from the Web server, stores the requested information locally, and sends the information to the client. The next time the Web cache gets a request for the same information, it simply returns the locally cached data instead of searching over the Internet, thus, reducing Internet traffic and response time.
Web caching is the caching of web documents (e.g., HTML pages, images) in order to reduce bandwidth usage, server load, and perceived "lag". A web cache stores copies of documents passing through it; subsequent requests may be satisfied from the cache if certain conditions are met.