Summary

Users surf the WWW in a regular fashion; thus, it is possible to exploit that information in caching systems. Furthermore, since users spend a non-trivial amount of time reading a page, the time can be used to pre-fetch documents rather than let the network stay idle. This paper described the use of usage profiling, pre-fetching, and filtering techniques in the context of WWW caching.

The usage profiles employed the use of a directed graph to represent the path a user takes in surfing the web. This information is later used by the pre-fetch engine to issue pre-fetch requests to the cache manager. Meanwhile, the HTTP requests and responses are filtered to ensure good use of the available bandwidth.

Using various heuristics described in the paper, we implemented a proxy system that improved the network performance from the perspective of the browser. This had the effect of reducing the overall time spent on web sessions.