Prefetching Inlines to Improve Web Server Latency

Most HTML documents contain inlines, typically image files that are automatically requested from the server after the original document is parsed by the browser. In this paper, we analyze, through simulation, the potential benefits of having the server also parse the document and pre-fetch into its main memory cache the inlines that will be requested by the remote client. The parameters for the simulation were obtained from a detailed workload characterization of a Web server available to the authors. Response time improvements of up to 48% can be achieved with even moderate cache sizes.

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