An Evaluation of Document Prefetching in a Distributed Digital Library
Report, 2003

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.

Caching

Prefetching

Digital Library

Author

Jochen Hollmann

Chalmers, Department of Computer Engineering, Computer Architecture

Ardö Anders

Per Stenström

Chalmers, Department of Computer Engineering, Computer Architecture

Subject Categories

Computer Engineering

Other Computer and Information Science

More information

Created

10/7/2017