An Evaluation of Web Acceleration Techniques for the Developing World

Web clients in the developing world experience long response time due to poor network connectivity. This paper evaluates existing and new web acceleration techniques using access traces from Iraq, Zambia, and Cambodia. We validate the effectiveness of proxy caching and observe around 40% cache hit ratio. But our evaluation finds limited benefit of web prefetching (<1% hit rate by the history-based prefetching that previously reported around 10% hit rate [7]). This is because proxy caching diminishes the benefits of prefetching at individual clients and further many (40–60%) cache misses are accesses to dynamic web applications that are not prefetchable. To accelerate dynamic web applications for the developing world, we explore the feasibility and performance of mirroring dynamic applications on near-client proxy servers. Preliminary evaluation on a collaborative office application shows an order of magnitude performance improvement by the local mirroring.