A prefetching Web caching method using adaptive search patterns

As the Internet continues to grow exponentially, the Web caching technology becomes one of very important technologies in computer networks. The mechanism of a web caching affects the performance of Internet servers or proxy servers. This paper presents a new approach to predict Web documents by tracking search patterns of users and by managing documents depending upon the number of hits. Several hot spot documents and their linked documents are stored in cache servers and transmitted to clients for fast response. Generally cache servers store not only the first document of a site but also all documents navigated through linked documents. The adaptive prefetching method, using search patterns of users, analyzes documents along with the navigation patterns and marks several popular documents. If one of these marked documents is hit, all marked documents are loaded into cache at a time. Cache servers can save their cache memory space as well as provide fast response to clients. The results show that the response time of the proposed method decreases to 20% compared with other methods.