Characterizing and Improving Web Page Load Times

Abstract

Web page load time (PLT) is a key performance metric that many techniques aim to improve. PLT is much slower than lower-level latencies, but the reason was not well understood. This dissertation first characterizes theWeb page load time by abstracting a dependency model between network and computation activities. We have built a tool WProf based on this model, that identifies the bottlenecks of PLTs of hundreds ofWeb pages, and that provides basis for evaluating PLT-reducing techniques. Next, we evaluate SPDY’s contributions to PLTs and find that SPDY’s impact on PLTs is largely limited by the dependencies and browser computation. This suggests that the page load process should be restructured to remove the dependencies so as to improve PLTs. Thus, we propose SplitBrowser that preprocesses Web pages on a proxy server and migrate carefully crafted state to the client so as to simplify the client-side page load process. We have shown that SplitBrowser reduces PLTs by more than half under a variety of mobile settings that span less compute power and slower networks.