According to non-limiting embodiments disclosed herein, the functionality of an object cache in a server can be extended to monitor and track web traffic, and in particular to perform rate accounting on selected web traffic. As the server communicates with clients (e.g., receiving HTTP requests and responding to those requests), the server can use its existing object cache storage and existing object cache services to monitor web traffic by recording how often a client makes a particular request in the object cache and/or other data about the requests. Preferably, the object cache is still used for conventional caching of objects, the object cache thus providing a dual role by storing both web objects and rate accounting data.