Method of improving user response time and network traffic in an internet by Graceful Caching

In a multi-media system, various scale databases are geographically distributed and mutually connected by a network. It is, therefore, of vital importance for efficiently constructing its entire system to avoid such a situation that the information is stored for unnecessarily long period and it goes around uselessly in the network. Based on the above mentioned background, we have already proposed a new caching scheme called "Graceful Caching", by which information in databases is progressively erased and suddenly retrieved according to its need. In addition. as an extension of the preceding study we have proposed and investigated proxy server systems which introduces hierarchical image caching mechanism useful for the existing World Wide Web. We showed that by applying the scheme, the traffic between a server and terminals could be remarkably reduced and the proxy's memory could be efficiently utilized.