Hinted caching in the web

Abstract

The World Wide Web, like any practical distributed system, benefits greatly from caching. Many studies have shown relatively poor cache performance, because existing caches depend on temporal locality, and reference patterns in the Web do not have particularly high temporal locality. We can improve Web caching by exploiting spatial locality. This requires protocol changes to allow servers to provide hints to caches, both to support prefetching and to improve allocation and replacement policies.