Ask HN: Resources on application data preloading and caching strategies?

Intuitively it seems to me that the major issue with perceived slowness of large business applications (such as CRM systems) is the absence of any pre-loading / caching of data for the user.

In my experience most users only work on a small subset of data and work on the same or similar records and processes every day, so I'd be interested to have the application learn what subset this is for a particular user or group of users and then do 'pre-emptive' loading to increase the responsiveness of the application and improve the user experience.

If I want to avoid re-inventing the wheel, what are some good resources that deal with strategies on how to achieve this? What are common pitfalls?