iBlog - Ilia Alshanetsky

A few days ago I read an interesting blog entry on Chris Shifflet's blog about Google Web Accelerator (GWA) and how it affects PHP applications. The purpose of the GWA is to accelerate the web page loading speed and thus improve user experience. This is done through a series of techniques which involve different caching mechanisms, periodically downloading copies of frequently accessed pages and prefetching.

The prefetching works on a basis of a premise that when you load a web page you will not view just this page, but also click of a few links from that page. So, rather then waiting for you to click those links, while you are reading the current page, the browser is prefetching the content of the linked pages in the background. By the time you decide to click on the next link, its content is already sitting in browsers cache and can be loaded instantly. Pretty neat trick, right?

While it is a neat trick, it does present several serious problem that affect both the webmasters and the users themselves. Let's start with the webmasters, since after all that's a bit closer to heart
Continue reading "Google Web Accelerator and the dangers of prefetching"