Mining Web logs to improve hit ratios of prefetching and caching

In the Internet, proxy servers play the key roles between users and Web sites, which could reduce the response time of user requests and save network bandwidth. Basically, an efficient buffer manager should be built in a proxy server to cache frequently accessed documents in the buffer, thereby achieving better response time. In the paper, we developed an access sequence miner to mine popular surfing 2-sequences with their conditional probabilities from the proxy log, and stored them in the rule table. Then, according to buffer contents and the rule table, a prediction-based buffer manager also developed here makes appropriate actions such as document caching, document prefetching, and even cache/prefetch buffer size adjusting to achieve better buffer utilization. Through the simulation, we found that our approach has better performance than the others, in the quantitative measures such as hit ratios and byte hit ratios of accessed documents.