An Evaluation of Document Prefetching in a Distributed Digital Library

Latency is a fundamental problem for all distributed systems including digital libraries. To reduce user perceived delays both caching -- keeping accessed objects for future use -- and prefetching -- transferring objects ahead of access time -- can be used. In a previous paper we have reported that caching is not worthwhile for digital libraries due to low re-access frequencies. In this paper we evaluate our previous findings that prefetching can be used instead. To do this we have set up an experimental prefetching proxy which is able to retrieve documents from remote fulltext archives before the user demands them. Using a simple prediction to keep the overhead of unnecessarily transfered data limited, we find that it is possible to cut the user perceived average delay a factor of two