A User-Oriented Proxy Server Supporting Data Prefetching and Refreshing

Abstract

Most studies of the proxy server focus on increasing the cache hit rate of the proxy server by caching the most popular pages. But the most popular pages are not what users need sometimes, especially for the professional. In this paper, we propose a user oriented proxy system supporting prefetching and refreshing. The users could subscribe the URLs he wants and the documents of the subscribed URLs will be cached and automatically refreshed by the proxy system. A private space is reserved to store the subscribed pages to avoid being flushed out in the cache replacement. Thus, whenever the subscribed pages are requested, they can be got directly from the proxy system. The proxy system can be used as an ordinary proxy server in addition to supporting prefetching and refreshing. To evaluate the service capacity of our proxy system, we collected statistic data from four running proxy serves to estimate the storage requirement of a typical subscription.