Author:
Christophe Deleuze
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de conception et d’intégration des systèmes (LCIS), France
Keyword(s):
Web performance, HTTP, persistent connections, embedded objects, web content.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Internet Technology
;
Network Systems, Proxies and Servers
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
;
Web Services and Web Engineering
Abstract:
Despite continuously growing network and server capacity, web performance is still often bad. Changes in version 1.1 of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) have brought solutions to some of the performance problems, but daily experience shows that problems remain. In this work, we examine some characteristics of a number of popular web pages and try to get insights about what could be made to enhance overall web performance. We find that most web pages have very large numbers of small objects, something HTTP doesn’t handle very well, and that style-sheets were expected to avoid. Moreover, half of the sites we examined do not support HTTP enhancements such as persistent connections and request pipelining. Finally, most sites embed objects from multiple (and often at lot of) different hosts.