CRII: NeTS: Making Sense of Mobile Web Page Performance

全球移动流量很快将超过非移动流量。对许多用户来说，手机已经是他们唯一的“电脑”。因此，移动网页正在迅速成为内容的主要门户。然而，在手机上加载网页的速度非常慢。已经有几种优化设计来加快Web页面的速度，但没有灵丹妙药：提高一个页面速度的优化可以，而且通常确实会降低另一个页面的速度。这个项目的目标之一是阐明为什么与桌面相比，手机上的网页加载速度更慢。该项目将使用这种瓶颈分析来设计算法、技术和工具，以准确地估计任何给定的优化是否有助于或进一步降低页面加载时间。该项目的最终目标是一个名为ProX的综合分析框架，它将帮助Web开发人员、网络提供商、浏览器供应商和研究人员设计和选择一组正确的优化方案，以显著提高移动Web的速度。问题是，移动Web生态系统相当复杂。这使得理解页面加载瓶颈和分析优化具有挑战性。其次，加载一个页面所需的时间取决于各种因素。在这种可变性下隔离优化的效果并不是一件容易的事。为了应对这些挑战，该项目提出了两个关键想法：(1)零散分析：网页加载不是一个原子活动。页面加载过程由几个较小的活动组成，这些活动形成了复杂的依赖关系结构。该项目建议对Web页面流程进行分解，并分析每个子活动以确定瓶颈。此外，还将研究优化对每个子活动的影响。这种零敲碎打的分析解决了Web生态系统中的复杂性挑战，以及(2)隔离：该项目建议开发技术和实验工具来控制页面加载过程的可变性。目标是通过强制其他不相关参数的影响接近常量来隔离给定优化的影响。该项目开发的技术将更广泛地适用于研究其他移动应用程序，如视频。

Mobile traffic is soon poised to exceed non-mobile traffic across the world. Already, for many users, mobile phones are the only 'computer' they own. As a result, mobile Web pages are fast becoming the primary portal for content. However, loading a Web page on the mobile phone is exceedingly slow. There have been several optimizations designed to speed up Web pages, but there is no silver bullet: an optimization that speeds up one page can, and often does, slow down another page. One of the goals of this project is to shed light on why Web pages load slower on the phone as compared to a desktop. The project will use this bottleneck analysis to design algorithms, techniques, and tools, to accurately estimate if any given optimization will help or further slow down the page load time. The end goal of the project is a comprehensive analysis framework called ProfX that will help Web developers, network providers, browser vendors, and researchers design and choose the right set of optimizations to significantly speed up the mobile Web.The problem is that the mobile Web ecosystem is fairly complex. This makes understanding the page load bottlenecks and analyzing optimizations challenging. Second, the time it takes to load a page depends on various factors. Isolating the effect of an optimization under such variability is non-trivial. To address these challenges, the project proposes two key ideas: (1) Piecemeal analysis: Web page loading is not an atomic activity. The page load process is made up of several smaller activities that form a complex dependency structure. The project proposes to decompose the Web page process and analyze each sub activity to identify the bottlenecks. Further, the effect of an optimization will be studied on each of these sub activities. This piecemeal analysis addresses the complexity challenge in the Web ecosystem, and (2) Isolation: The project proposes to develop techniques and experimental tools to control the variability of the page load process. The goal is to isolate the effect of a given optimization by forcing the effect of other unrelated parameters to be a near constant. The techniques developed in this project will be more broadly applicable to studying other mobile applications such as video.