A Prefetching Server for Reducing Startup Time of Embedded Multimedia

Due to the increase of the number of web pages consisting of multimedia embedded objects in recent years, finding a suitable model for the web pages including multimedia files has become an important issue for efficient catching and web page delivery time. Our characterization shows the existence of a few media objects embedded in the popular web pages that contain mostly image and text object. Also this characterization shows despite of existence of a few embedded media objects, web pages sizes are still small and the server can prefetch them efficiently in a proxy cache. Thus by prefetching the embedded objects of a web page containing a media object, we are able to reduce the delivery time for the initial portion of the multimedia object as well as the total down load time of the web page. We have developed a custom web server and a proxy cache to implement this idea. This paper shows the achieved improvement. Keywords web server, embedded objects, multimedia files, workload characterization, prefetching, network latency, heavytailed distribution.