Understanding and Improving the Performance of Web Page Loads

The web is vital to our daily lives, yet web pages are often slow to load. The inefficiency and complexity of loading web pages can be attributed to the dependencies between resources within a web page, which also leads to underutilization of the CPU and network on client devices. My thesis research seeks solutions that enable better use of the client-side CPU and network during page loads. Such solutions can be categorized into three types of approaches: 1) leveraging a proxy to optimize web page loads, 2) modifying the end-to-end interaction between client browsers and web servers, and 3) rewriting web pages. Each approach offers various benefits and trade-offs. This dissertation explores three specific solutions. First, CASPR is a proxy-based solution that enables clients to offload JavaScript computations to proxies. CASPR loads web pages on behalf of clients and transforms every page into a version that is simpler for clients to process, leading to a 1.7s median improvement in web page rendering for popular CASPR web pages. Second, Vroom rethinks how page loads work; in order to minimize dependencies between resources, it enables web servers to provide resource hints to clients and ensures that resources are loaded with proper prioritization. As a result, Vroom halves the median load times for popular news and sports websites. Finally, I conducted a longitudinal study to understand how web pages have changed over time and how these changes have affected performance.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163157/1/vaspol_1.pd

On Landing and Internal Web Pages

There is a rich body of literature on measuring and optimizing nearly every aspect of the web, including characterizing the structure and content of web pages, devising new techniques to load pages quickly, and evaluating such techniques. Virtually all of this prior work used a single page, namely the landing page (i.e., root document, "/"), of each web site as the representative of all pages on that site. In this paper, we characterize the differences between landing and internal (i.e., non-root) pages of 1000 web sites to demonstrate that the structure and content of internal pages differ substantially from those of landing pages, as well as from one another. We review more than a hundred studies published at top-tier networking conferences between 2015 and 2019, and highlight how, in light of these differences, the insights and claims of nearly two-thirds of the relevant studies would need to be revised for them to apply to internal pages.Going forward, we urge the networking community to include internal pages for measuring and optimizing the web. This recommendation, however, poses a non-trivial challenge: How do we select a set of representative internal web pages from a web site? To address the challenge, we have developed Hispar, a "top list" of 100,000 pages updated weekly comprising both the landing pages and internal pages of around 2000 web sites. We make Hispar and the tools to recreate or customize it publicly available