Well, prefetching could help in a couple ways:

- If your DNS server sucks (as SBC's server, on the other side of my DSL connection, often does), this gets that lookup done before you click on the link.

- If the prefetch is for something that I want, then when I click on it, I'll already have the base HTML file, so I'll see something immediately. Probably not a big deal for DSL, but potentially a bigger win for modem users. And, if done properly, any long-running prefetches could be prematurely cancelled once you've discovered that the prefetch wasn't helpful.

- Prefetching definitely places additional load on servers, but the extent of that load is directly related to how accurate the prefetch is at predicting future behavior. If the prefetch is accurate, then the additional server load is zero.

Thinking it over, I'd say that prefetching the DNS query would be the right answer for my needs. Hmm...