Web Caching and Replication

12.9. Summary

Prefetching can be an important tool in improving user experiences. Studies have indicated that it can potentially be more effective in reducing Web access latency than passive caching. A fundamental trade-off in prefetching is that it decreases latency at the expense of extra bandwidth consumption. Some techniques attempt to get around this trade-off by using only "free" bandwidth, for example, the bandwidth of the otherwise idle network connection. One should realize, however, that much of the network path between clients and servers is usually a resource shared among numerous computers on the Internet, so identifying truly idle connections can be done only in some specific computing environments. An important example of such ...