Abstract. Web caching and replication tune capacity with performance and they have become essential components of the Web. In practice, caching and replication techniques have been applied in proxy servers and Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) respectively. In this paper, we investigate the benefits of integrating caching policies on a CDN ’ s infrastructure. Using a simulation testbed, our results indicate that there is much room for performance improvement in terms of perceived latency, hit ratio and byte hit ratio. Moreover, we show that the combination of caching with replication fortifies CDNs against flash crowd events. 1