METHOD FOR IMPROVING WEB PERFORMANCE BY ADAPTING SERVERS BASED ON CLIENT CLUSTER CHARACTERIZATION

The present invention is a method for improving delivery of content to a client communicating with a server on the Web. Groups or clusters of clients are formed by processing the IP addresses of the clients according to a network-aware, radix-encoded trie classification process. The groups of clients are categorized based on information about one or more clients in each group that can be determined by the server. That information is used to help drive tailored actions on the part of Web servers. Users with poor connectivity may choose not to spend much time at a Web site if it takes a long time to receive a page, even if the Web server at the site is not the bottleneck. Retaining such clients may be of interest to a Web site. Better-connected clients may be able to receive enhanced representations of Web pages such as with higher quality images.