Sunday, June 18, 2006

Web acceleration without prefetching

I really like this paper, "Prefetching the Means for Document Transfer", by Edith Cohen and Haim Kaplan.

The paper discusses ways to accelerate web browsing doing everything short of actually prefetching the page. I thought it was particularly cool that significant performance wins could be found just by preemptively doing DNS lookups for all the probable transitions from a given page.

Given all the problems with prefetching that overly clever applications like Google Web Accelerator discovered, partial prefetching -- doing the DNS lookups and connecting to the webserver, but not prefetching the content -- is a clever idea.

[via a paper by Brian Davison]

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This article appears to be from the year 2000, I wonder if the conclusions are still true. DNS infrastructure used to be very bad in the late 90s, but seems significantly better now.