In a network supporting transactions between clients and servers over a
network path having operating characteristics to overcome, data is
transported to overcome the operating characteristics using user
affinities and dynamic user location information to selectively preload
data, or representations, signatures, segments, etc. of data, in order to
overcome the one or more operating characteristic. Examples of operating
characteristics to overcome include bandwidth limitations, errors and
latency. The dynamic location information can be stored in data
structures accessible by agents of a data server and the data structures
are populated based on user activities with respect to proxies associated
with user locations, or the dynamic location information can be obtained
implicitly as proxies maintain connections after termination by clients
and the use of those maintained connections for preloading of data for
the users associated with those clients. The data being preloaded can be
protocol-specific data or protocol-independent data.