Researchers Find Way to Speed Up Webpage Loading Time by 34 Percent
Even
if you're not planning to upgrade your Internet plan, webpages may soon
start loading faster on your browser. Researchers have devised a new
way of displaying content that shaves roughly one-third of the current
loading timeResearchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory have devised a framework called Polaris that
maps all secondary and tertiary download locations utilised by a
webpage. This, they claim, facilitates more effective downloading,
saving up to 34 percent of load time."It can take up to 100 milliseconds
each time a browser has to cross a mobile network to fetch a piece of
data," says Ph.D student Ravi Netravali. "As pages increase in
complexity, they often require multiple trips that create delays that
really add up. Our approach minimises the number of round trips so that
we can substantially speed up a page's load-time."When you fire up a
webpage on your browser, it reaches out to the network to fetch objects
such as HTML files, and different scripts. The problem is that an
element could be dependent on another element, and this dependency is
not easily visible by HTML. This, in turn, slows down the loading time
of a Web browser. "Browsers have to be conservative about the order in
which they load objects, which tends to increase the number of
cross-network trips and slow down the page load."This is where Polaris
comes into play. It tracks all the interactions between objects, and
then plots a dependency graph for all such interactions. The researchers
noted that dependency trackers have existed before, but the parameters
that Polaris utilises make it more efficient.That's not all. Researchers
add that Polaris' scheduler, which retrieves objects, is written in
JavaScript. This apparently means that Polaris can be used with
"unmodified browsers" and can by deployed on a site-by-site basis. "We
are hopeful that the system will eventually be integrated into the
browser," he says.
COMMENTS