24 research outputs found
adPerf: Characterizing the Performance of Third-party Ads
Monetizing websites and web apps through online advertising is widespread in
the web ecosystem. The online advertising ecosystem nowadays forces publishers
to integrate ads from these third-party domains. On the one hand, this raises
several privacy and security concerns that are actively studied in recent
years. On the other hand, given the ability of today's browsers to load dynamic
web pages with complex animations and Javascript, online advertising has also
transformed and can have a significant impact on webpage performance. The
performance cost of online ads is critical since it eventually impacts user
satisfaction as well as their Internet bill and device energy consumption.
In this paper, we apply an in-depth and first-of-a-kind performance
evaluation of web ads. Unlike prior efforts that rely primarily on adblockers,
we perform a fine-grained analysis on the web browser's page loading process to
demystify the performance cost of web ads. We aim to characterize the cost by
every component of an ad, so the publisher, ad syndicate, and advertiser can
improve the ad's performance with detailed guidance. For this purpose, we
develop an infrastructure, adPerf, for the Chrome browser that classifies page
loading workloads into ad-related and main-content at the granularity of
browser activities (such as Javascript and Layout). Our evaluations show that
online advertising entails more than 15% of browser page loading workload and
approximately 88% of that is spent on JavaScript. We also track the sources and
delivery chain of web ads and analyze performance considering the origin of the
ad contents. We observe that 2 of the well-known third-party ad domains
contribute to 35% of the ads performance cost and surprisingly, top news
websites implicitly include unknown third-party ads which in some cases build
up to more than 37% of the ads performance cost
Leveraging Program Analysis to Reduce User-Perceived Latency in Mobile Applications
Reducing network latency in mobile applications is an effective way of
improving the mobile user experience and has tangible economic benefits. This
paper presents PALOMA, a novel client-centric technique for reducing the
network latency by prefetching HTTP requests in Android apps. Our work
leverages string analysis and callback control-flow analysis to automatically
instrument apps using PALOMA's rigorous formulation of scenarios that address
"what" and "when" to prefetch. PALOMA has been shown to incur significant
runtime savings (several hundred milliseconds per prefetchable HTTP request),
both when applied on a reusable evaluation benchmark we have developed and on
real applicationsComment: ICSE 201