Cost-benefit analysis of web prefetching algorithms from the user’s point of view.pdfVIP

Cost-Benefit Analysis of Web Prefetching Algorithms from the User’s Point of View Josep Dom`enech, Ana Pont, Julio Sahuquillo, and Jos´e A. Gil Department of Computing Engineering (DISCA), Universitat Polit`ecnica de Val`encia, Spain jodode@doctor.upv.es, {apont, jsahuqui, jagil}@disca.upv.es Abstract. Since web prefetching techniques were proposed in the sec- ond half of the 90s as mechanisms to reduce final users’ perceived la- tency, few attempts to evaluate their performance have been done in the research literature. Even more, to the knowledge of the authors this is the first study that evaluates different proposals from the user’s point of view, i.e., considering the latency perceived by the user as the key metric. This gap between the proposals and their correct performance comparison is due to the difficulty to use a homogeneous framework and workload. This paper is aimed at reducing this gap by proposing a cost- benefit analysis methodology to fairly compare prefetching algorithms from the user’s point of view. The proposed methodology has been used to compare three of the most used algorithms in the bibliography, con- sidering current workloads. 1 Introduction Several ways of prefetching user’s requests have been proposed in the literature: the preprocessing of a request by the server [1], the transference of the object requested in advance [2], and the pre-establishment of connections that are pre- dicted to be made [3]. Despite the large amount of research works focusing on this topic, comparative and evaluation studies from the user’s point of view are rare. On the one hand, the underlying baseline system where prefetching is ap- plie