Patent ID: 7720936

Claim:
In a network environment having an appliance acting as a proxy between a client requesting pages and a server responding to client requests, a method for resolving an address of a host name identified by a uniform resource locator using the internet protocol address identified as a destination of a request, the method comprising the steps of: (a) receiving, by an appliance, a request packet from a client requesting via an application protocol layer a uniform resource locator of a page; (b) identifying, by the appliance, from the request packet an internet protocol address of a destination of the request; (c) associating, by the appliance, the internet protocol address of the destination with a host name identified by the uniform resource locator; (d) storing, by the appliance, in a cache an entry identifying the internet protocol address as an address of the host name; (e) receiving, by the appliance, one of a Domain Name Server (DNS) request of the client to resolve the host name or a second request of the client for the uniform resource locator identifying the host name; and (f) identifying, by the appliance, the entry in the cache as a resolved address of the host name.