A Review of Web Cache Prefetching

Abstract

Web caches help to reduce latencies arising from slow networks through storing and reusing what was used before. Repeat access to a cached resource does not incur network latencies. However, resources that have never been used will not be found in the cache. Cache prefetching is a technique that helps to fill a cache with still-unused resources in anticipation that these resources will be used in the near future. Typically these unused resources are related to the resources that have been accessed in the recent past. While web caching exploits temporal locality, prefetching attempts to exploit spatial locality. Access to the prefetched resources will be cache hits, and therefore reduces the latency as perceived by the user. This paper reviews the cache infrastructure supported by the hypertext transfer protocol and discusses web cache prefetching in general, including Mozilla's prefetching infrastructure. It then classifies and reviews some prefetching techniques.