Reducing Web latency using reference point caching

To reduce Web access latencies, we propose a new paradigm for caching at the reference point of a document. If a document X is referred to from a document Y, information is cached at Y to reduce the latency of client accesses to X. We focus on two specific instances of this paradigm: caching IP addresses to avoid DNS lookups at clients, and caching information about documents to avoid setting up new connections. Avoiding DNS lookup saves over 4 seconds 10-12% of the time and avoiding connection setup saves 240 ms on the average. These ideas enable new services such as search engines that return IP addresses to speed up search sessions, and caching at regional information servers that goes beyond the capabilities of today's proxy caching.