Pre-fetch document caching to improve World-Wide Web user response time

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Date
1996-03-15
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Volume Title
Publisher
Virginia Tech
Abstract

The World-Wide Web, or the Web, is currently one of the most highly used network services. Because of this, improvements and new technologies are rapidly being developed and deployed. One important area of study is improving user response time through the use of caching mechanisms. Most prior work considered multiple user caches running on cache relay systems. These systems are mostly post-caching systems; they perform no "look ahead," or pre-fetch, functions. This research studies a pre-fetch caching scheme based on Web server access statistics. The scheme employs a least-recently used replacement policy and allows for multiple simultaneous document retrievals to occur. The scheme is based on a combined statistical and locality of reference model associated with the links in hypertext systems. Results show that cache hit rates are doubled over schemes that use only post-caching and are mixed for user response time improvements. The conclusion is that pre-fetch caching Web documents offers an improvement over post-caching methods and should be studied in detail for both single user and multiple user systems.

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Keywords
World-Wide Web, Pre-Fetch Caching
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