Proxy-based prefetching and pushing of web resources

Abstract: The use of WWW is more prevalent now than ever. Latency has a significant impact on the WWW, with higher latencies causing longer loading time of webpages. On the other hand, if we can lower the latency, we will lower the loading time of a webpage. Latencies are often caused by data traveling long distances or through gateways that add additional processing delays to the forwarded packets. In this thesis we evaluate the latency benefits of different algorithms for prefetching and pushing of web resources, from a proxy when the client cache is known. We found that the most beneficial algorithm is a two sequence data mining technique. This algorithm is evaluated on a live system where we improve loading time by approximately 246 ms with only a 27% traffic increase on average. The results were measured by evaluating a large set of clients on Opera Turbo 2, a distributed proxy with knowledge of the client’s cache. We also concluded that by using a more conservative strategy we can push prefetched resources to the client, reducing the client requests by approximately 9.3% without any significant traffic increase between proxy and client.