Exploring the bounds of web latency reduction from caching and prefetching

Appeared in Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems (USITS '97).

Abstract

Prefetching and caching are techniques commonly used in I/O systems to reduce latency. Many researchers have advocated the use of caching and prefetching to reduce latency in the Web. We derive several bounds on the performance improvements seen from these techniques, and then use traces of Web proxy activity taken at Digital Equipment Corporation to quantify these bounds.

We found that for these traces, local proxy caching could reduce latency by at best 26%, prefetching could reduce latency by at best 57%, and a combined caching and prefetching proxy could provide at best a 60% latency reduction. Furthermore, we found that how far in advance a prefetching algorithm was able to prefetch an object was a significant factor in its ability to reduce latency. We note that the latency reduction from caching is significantly limited by the rapid changes of objects in the Web. We conclude that for the workload studied caching offers moderate assistance in reducing latency. Prefetching can offer more than twice the improvement of caching but is still limited in its ability to reduce latency.

Publication date:
December 1997

Authors:
Thomas Kroeger
Darrell D. E. Long
Jeffrey C. Mogul

Projects:
Prediction and Grouping

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{kroeger-usits97,
  author       = {Thomas Kroeger and Darrell D. E. Long and Jeffrey C. Mogul},
  title        = {Exploring the bounds of web latency reduction from caching and prefetching},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems (USITS '97)},
  pages        = {13–22},
  month        = dec,
  year         = {1997},
}