A prefetching and control system for a computer network environment. The user configures the client's prefetch parameters which are: enabling/disabling prefetching, prefetch threshold value, and the maximum number of documents to prefetch. A prefetch value or weight is contained in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) page or prefetch file, called a pathfile, for each link. The HTML page contains the prefetch values for each of its links, while pathfile contains the weights for every link on the HTML page associated with the Universal Resource Locator (URL). The client compares the prefetch or weight values of each link with its threshold value to decide if the link should be prefetched and placed in the local cache as long as the maximum number of documents to prefetch is not exceeded. Pathfiles reside on the server and are created by the server or web administrator/author. The server automatically creates the pathfiles from its log files which are filtered to retain all of the valid document requests and average paths are derived from the filtered results. Weights are assigned to each path in the URL by the server and inserted into the pathfile along with the associated paths. If no log files exist on the server, then the web administrator/author may manually enter in the weights for each path.