An important design question for Active-Cache enabled proxies is the resource management policy. Essentially, the policy must make three decisions:
There are typically two reasons why a proxy wants to cache a document or object: to reduce outgoing network traffic, and to improve the availability of a distributed service. When the proxy's goal is to reduce network traffic, the proxy is willing to cache the most-frequently requested documents or objects, even if they are from untrusted servers. When the proxy's goal is to improve service availability, the proxy often knows about the service's importance to its users, trusts the server, and is willing to invest more resource to host it.
Thus, we have two categories of applet-attached documents (in other words, objects): un-negotiated ones and negotiated ones. Un-negotiated objects are from untrusted servers; their primary purpose is to perform processing at the proxy site to avoid network traffic to the server. Negotiated objects are from servers that go through a negotiation protocol with the proxy. They receive more resources and are cached at the proxy for as long as necessary.