Caching is a well-known strategy for improving the performance of Web-based systems. The heart of a caching system is its page replacement policy, which selects the pages to be replaced in a cache when a request arrives. In this paper, we present a Web-log mining method for caching Web objects and use this algorithm to enhance the performance of Web caching systems. In our approach, we develop an n-gram-based prediction algorithm that can predict future Web requests. The prediction model is then used to extend the well-known GDSF caching policy. We empirically show that the system performance is improved using the predictive-caching approach.

Web caching and prefetching are well known strategies for improving the performance of Internet systems. When combined with web log mining, these strategies can decide to cache and prefetch web documents with higher accuracy. In this paper, we present an application of web log mining to obtain web-document access patterns and use these patterns to extend the well-known GDSF caching policies and prefetching policies. Using real web logs, we show that this application of data mining can achieve dramatic improvement to web-access performance.