Improving Web Prefetching by Making Predictions at Prefetch

Abstract

Most of the research attempts to improve Web prefetching techniques have focused on the prediction algorithm with the objective of increasing its precision or, in the best case, to reduce the user's perceived latency. In contrast, to improve prefetching performance, this work concentrates in the prefetching engine and proposes the Prediction at Prefetch (P@P) technique. This paper explains how a prefetching technique can be extended to include our P@P proposal on real world conditions without changes in the web architecture or HTTP protocol. To show how this proposal can improve prefetching performance an extensive performance evaluation study has been done and the results show that P@P can considerably reduce the user's perceived latency with no additional cost over the basic prefetch mechanism.

Key factors in web latency savings in an experimental prefetching system

“…The former technique, namely Predict On Secondary (POS), allows the perfect predictor to provide hints both in primary and in secondary objects. In the latter technique, Predict at Prefetch (P@P) [23], the predictor performs predictions not only when the user explicitly requests objects, but also when the browser prefetches previously predicted objects.…”

“…They are prefetched later during the browser idle time while the object is being displayed. Further details can be found in [23].…”