A CDN
edge server is configured to provide one or more extended
content delivery features on
a domain-specific, customer-specific basis, preferably using configuration files that are distributed to the edge servers using a
configuration system. A given configuration file includes a set of content handling rules and directives that facilitate one or more advanced content handling features, such as content prefetching. When prefetching is enabled, the
edge server retrieves objects embedded in pages (normally
HTML content) at the same time it serves the page to the browser rather than waiting for the browser's request for these objects. This can significantly decrease the overall rendering time of the page and improve the user experience of a
Web site. Using a set of
metadata tags, prefetching can be applied to either cacheable or uncacheable content. When prefetching is used for cacheable content, and the object to be prefetched is already in cache, the object is moved from disk into memory so that it is ready to be served. When prefetching is used for uncacheable content, preferably the retrieved objects are uniquely associated with the
client browser request that triggered the prefetch so that these objects cannot be served to a different
end user. By applying
metadata in the configuration file, prefetching can be combined with tiered distribution and other
edge server configuration options to further improve the speed of delivery and / or to protect the origin
server from bursts of prefetching requests.