Abstract
Although Internet service providers and communications companies are continuously offering higher and higher bandwidths, users still complain about the high latency they perceive when downloading pages from the web. Therefore, latency can be considered as the main web performance metric from the user’s point of view. Many studies have demonstrated that web prefetching can be an interesting technique to reduce such latency at the expense of slightly increasing the network traffic. In this context, this paper presents an empirical study to investigate the maximum benefits that web users can expect from prefetching techniques in the current web. Unlike previous theoretical studies, this work considers a realistic prefetching architecture using real traces. In this way, the influence of real implementation constraints are considered and analyzed. The results obtained show that web prefetching could improve page latency up to 52% in the studied traces.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Balamash, A., Krunz, M., & Nain, P. (2007). Performance analysis of a client-side caching/prefetching system for web traffic. Computer Networks, 51(13), 3673–3692.
Bestavros, A. (1995). Using speculation to reduce server load and service time on the www. In Proc. of the 4th ACM international conference on information and knowledge management. Baltimore, USA.
Bestavros, A., & Cunha, C. (1996). Server-initiated document dissemination for the WWW. In IEEE data engineering bulletin. [Online]. Available: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.128.266. Accessed 29 November 2011.
Bouras, C., Konidaris, A., & Kostoulas, D. (2004). Predictive prefetching on the web and its potential impact in the wide area. In World Wide Web: Internet and web information systems (Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 143–179). The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.
Changa, T., Zhuangb, Z., Velayuthamc, A., & Sivakumara, R. (2008). WebAccel: Accelerating web access for low-bandwidth hosts. Computer Networks, 52(11), 2129–2147.
Davison, B. D. (2002). The design and evaluation of web prefetching and caching techniques. Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University.
de la Ossa, B., Gil, J. A., Sahuquillo, J., & Pont, A. (2007). Delfos: The oracle to predict next web user’s accesses. In Proc. of the IEEE 21st international conference on advanced information networking and applications. Niagara Falls, Canada.
de la Ossa, B., Pont, A., Sahuquillo, J., & Gil, J. A. (2010). Referrer graph: A low-cost web prediction algorithm. In Proc. of the 25th ACM symposium on applied computing (pp. 831–838). doi:10.1145/1774088.1774260.
de la Ossa, B., Sahuquillo, J., Pont, A., & Gil, J. A. (2009). An empirical study on maximum latency saving in web prefetching. In Proc. of the 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on web intelligence (WI’09).
Dom̀enech, J., Gil, J. A., Sahuquillo, J., & Pont, A. (2006a). DDG: An efficient prefetching algorithm for current web generation. In Proc. of the 1st IEEE workshop on hot topics in web systems and technologies (HotWeb). Boston, USA.
Domènech, J., Gil, J. A., Sahuquillo, J., & Pont, A. (2006b). Web prefetching performance metrics: A survey. Performance Evaluation, 63(9–10), 988–1004.
Domènech, J., Sahuquillo, J., Gil, J. A., & Pont, A. (2006c). The impact of the web prefetching architecture on the limits of reducing user’s perceived latency. In Proc. of the international conference on web intelligence. Piscataway: IEEE.
de la Ossa, B., Gil, J. A., Sahuquillo, J., & Pont, A. (2007). Improving web prefetching by making predictions at prefetch. In Proc. of the 3rd EURO-NGI conference on next generation internet networks design and engineering for heterogeneity (NGI’07) (pp. 21–27).
Duchamp, D. (1999). Prefetching hyperlinks. In Proc. of the 2nd USENIX symposium on internet technologies and systems. Boulder, USA.
Fan, L., Cao, P., Lin, W., & Jacobson, Q. (1999). Web prefetching between low-bandwidth clients and proxies: Potential and performance. In Proc. of the ACM SIGMETRICS conference on measurement and modeling of computer systems (pp. 178–187).
HTTP/1.1. [Online]. Available: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2616.html. Accessed 29 November 2011.
Kroeger, T. M., Long, D., & Mogul, J. C. (1997). Exploring the bounds of web latency reduction from caching and prefetching. In Proc. of the 1st USENIX symposium on internet technologies and systems. Monterrey, USA.
Link prefetching in mozilla faq (2011). [Online]. Available: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Link_prefetching_FAQ.
Markatos, E., & Chronaki, C. (1998). A top-10 approach to prefetching on the web. In Proc. of INET. Geneva, Switzerland.
Márquez, J., Domènech, J., Pont, A., & Gil, J. A. (2008). Exploring the benefits of caching and prefetching in the mobile web. In Second IFIP symposium on wireless communications and information technology for developing countries (WCITD 2008).
Padmanabhan, V., & Mogul, J. C. (1996). Using predictive prefetching to improve World Wide Web latency. In Proc. of the ACM SIGCOMM conference. Stanford University, USA.
Palpanas, T., & Mendelzon, A. (1999). Web prefetching using partial match prediction. In Proc. of the 4th international web caching workshop. San Diego, USA.
Schechter, S., Krishnan, M., & Smith, M. D. (1998). Using path profiles to predict http requests. In Proc. of the 7th international World Wide Web conference. Brisbane, Australia.
Teng, W., Chang, C., & Chen, M. (2005). Integrating web caching and web prefetching in client-side proxies. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 16(5), 444–455.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
de la Ossa, B.A., Sahuquillo, J., Pont, A. et al. Key factors in web latency savings in an experimental prefetching system. J Intell Inf Syst 39, 187–207 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-011-0188-x
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-011-0188-x