Reducing Web Latencies Using Precomputed Hints

Current network technology is bandwidth-rich but latency-poor; thus round-trip delays will dominate access latency for web traffic. We describe four new techniques that reduce the round-trips needed for web accesses. The techniques are based on the paradigm of preprocessing a web page to collect information about links and inline data in the page. Stored Address Binding almost always eliminates the DNS lookup (which can cost seconds) at the start of a transaction. In Informed Server Proxying, a server tells its client that it has cached pages referenced in a page the client just retrieved; this allows the client to retrieve the pages from its current connection, instead of creating a new connection. In Selective Link Redirect, a server can direct its client to any server that has cached a page referenced in the current document; this allows cooperating servers to balance load. Finally, Auto Inline Download allows a server to send inline data such as images and applets, without additional client requests. We describe implementations and measurements of these techniques