Systems and methods for adjusting caching policies for web service requests

A mechanism for caching Web services requests and responses, including testing an incoming request against the cached requests and associated responses is provided. The requests are selectively tested against the cached data in accordance with a set of policies. If a request selected hits in the cache, the response is served up from the cache. Otherwise, the request is passed to the corresponding Web-services server/application. Additionally, a set of predetermined cache specifications for generating request identifiers may be provided. The identifier specification may be autonomically adjusted by determining cache hit/cache miss ratios over the set of identifier specifications and over a set of sample requests. The set of specifications may then be sorted to reflect the performance of the respective cache specification algorithms for the current mix of requests.