Measuring and mitigating web performance bottlenecks in broadband access networks

Srikanth Sundaresan, Nick Feamster, Renata Teixeira, Nazanin Magharei

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

61 Scopus citations

Abstract

We measure Web performance bottlenecks in home broadband access networks and evaluate ways to mitigate these bottlenecks with caching within home networks. We first measure Web performance bottlenecks to nine popular Web sites from more than 5,000 broadband access networks and demonstrate that when the downstream throughput of the access link exceeds about 16 Mbits/s, latency is the main bottleneck for Web page load time. Next, we use a router-based Web measurement tool, Mirage, to deconstruct Web page load time into its constituent components (DNS lookup, TCP connection setup, object download) and show that simple latency optimizations can yield significant improvements in overall page load times. We then present a case for placing a cache in the home network and deploy three common optimizations: DNS caching, TCP connection caching, and content caching. We show that caching only DNS and TCP connections yields significant improvements in page load time, even when the user's browser is already performing similar independent optimizations. Finally, we use traces from real homes to demonstrate how prefetching DNS and TCP connections for popular sites in a home-router cache can achieve faster page load times.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationIMC 2013 - Proceedings of the 13th ACM Internet Measurement Conference
Pages213-225
Number of pages13
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Event13th ACM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2013 - Barcelona, Spain
Duration: Oct 23 2013Oct 25 2013

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC

Other

Other13th ACM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2013
Country/TerritorySpain
CityBarcelona
Period10/23/1310/25/13

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications

Keywords

  • Bottlenecks
  • Broadband networks
  • Connection caching
  • DNS prefetching
  • Popularity-based prefetching
  • Web performance

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