1. In a distributed system comprising a plurality of servers sharing access to data, a method for temporarily storing data objects in memory of said distributed system, the method comprising: reserving a portion of memory at each of said plurality of servers as a default data cache for temporarily storing data objects; in response to user input, allocating a portion of memory of at least one of said plurality of servers as a named cache reserved for temporarily storing a specified type of data object; in response to an operation at a particular server requesting a data object, determining whether the requested data object is of the specified type corresponding to the named cache at the particular server; if the data object is determined to be of the specified type corresponding to the named cache at the particular server, temporarily storing the requested data object in the named cache at the particular server; and otherwise, using the default data cache at the particular server for temporarily storing the requested data object.