What is a "cache"?

What is a "cache"?

Ethan Feerst and Dylan Stewart (Technology Therapist, Mac Guru) gives expert video advice on: What is a "search engine"?; What is the difference between "upload" and "download"?; What is "spam"? and more...

The cache was a lot more necessary during the original days of dial-up on the internet. The reason for this is because websites contain massive amounts of information, and a lot of that information stays the same from one day to the next. So if you were to go on one website today and the same website tomorrow, most of the information would stay the same, some of the text would change. So caches were created as a way of storing that data that doesn't change, because dial-up was a slow form of communication. In today's days of high speed internet, it's much less necessary to cache your websites as you browse. In fact, with a high speed connection, caching your website can actually slow you down. Because if your computer has to look in your cache and find out what's new, what's changed, what's different, it takes much more time than just pulling the new information down.