Prefetching in HTTP to improve performance in the delivery of web pages

In this work, two enhancements are presented to improve the performance of complete web page delivery. The first enhancement is the addition of disk to memory prefetching in Apache HTTP Server. This results in the number of files served from the web server cache to increase by 27%. The second enhancement is an addition to the HTTP protocol, allowing for server to client prefetching. Server to client prefetching eliminates the need for the web client to request the embedded objects of web pages. This modification results in page load times reduced to as low as 24.5% of the non-prefetching page load times.