Patent ID: 6073168
Filing Date: 2000-06-06
Classification: G06F,H04L,H04M,H04N,Y10S

Abstract:
A method for reducing delivery latency in a computer network when downloading electronic documents to a client system from a proxy server, the computer network including (i) a plurality of remote servers for accessing a plurality of network sites containing various types of content that can be viewed and downloaded, the network sites including electronic documents that contain both images and text for downloading, (ii) at least one proxy server for caching content from frequently accessed sites of one or more of the remote servers, and (iii) a plurality of client systems to which one or more such electronic documents are to be downloaded for display, wherein the method comprises the steps of:storing at the proxy server a document database for electronic documents previously requested by client systems, said database including information about the requested documents to facilitate transcoding and downloading of a document when requested by a client system, said information including information as to whether a document includes an image in addition to text, and if so, an indication as to the physical size of the image;receiving at the proxy server a request from a client system for a document;determining at the proxy server whether the requested document is referenced in said document database, and if not adding to the document database the information for that document after the document has been retrieved from a remote server; andif the requested document is referenced in said document database, initially downloading to the client system the requested document by leaving a blank area in the downloaded document that corresponds to the image so that the text of the requested document can be viewed at the client system while the image is retrieved from a remote server and then subsequently downloaded to the client system.