SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR REDUCING DNS LOOKUP TRAFFIC IN A COMPUTER DATA NETWORK

To reduce Domain Name System (DNS) lookup traffic in a computer data network, a client computer requests a DNS lookup. A router or other means then sends the request for a hostname of a web server to a DNS server and receives a corresponding IP address. Next, the router forwards the request to the web server. In response, the web server sends an HTML document. Upon receiving the HTML document, the router examines the document for URLs and sends one DNS lookup request for each of the distinct hostnames, regardless of how many times that distinct hostname appears in the HTML document. The router receives IP addresses, each of which corresponds to one of each of the distinct hostnames and modifies the HTML document by replacing the each of the distinct hostnames, including recurrences, in the URLs associated with the image elements with their corresponding IP addresses.