Exploiting Neglected Data Locality in Browsers

L. Xiao and X. Zhang 

Proceedings of the 10th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW10),
Hong Kong, May 1-5, 2001, (an extended abstract).

Abstract 

With an significant increase of memory and disk capacity
in workstations and PCs, and with the fine improvement of
web browser caching capability, users are able to enlarge
the browser cache size for more frequent accesses to the 
cached data objects and to retain them in an organized manner
for a longer period of time. However, the browser caches are not
shared among themselves and the available locality in browsers are
neglected in Web proxy caching. 

In this paper, we propose an enhanced caching technique, called
``Browser-Aware Proxy Server", to exploit the neglected data locality
in browser caches for further performance improvement.
Conducting trace-driven simulations, we present three new findings
and contributions: (1) The neglected data locality in browser caches
is significant and can be utilized for improving caching performance.
(2) The additional index file and the storage required by the
browser-aware proxy server are justifiable for the performance gain.
(3) We show that the browser-aware proxy server outperforms
a browser-unaware proxy server by 21% and 40%, measured by the average
hit ratio and byte hit ratio, respectively. We also show that web server
access latency can be reduced to 35\% with a slight increase of local
traffic in the client side.
 

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