Proxy overview

The main purpose of a proxy server is to save you the bandwidth of your Internet connection. If users access the Internet through a proxy, the proxy server can store the various requested objects passing through (like HTML pages, images, and other kinds of files) in its cache.

If the pages or images are requested again by the same user or by someone else, the proxy server will provide the requested item from its cache. This decreases the load on the Internet connection and the entire operation is also much faster than downloading images from the Internet again.

On the other hand, objects stored in cache, of a proxy server get outdated. You have to balance TTL (Time-To-Live) of stored documents carefully to avoid misunderstandings arising from the fact that you just read yesterdays CNN news - as an example.