CNS Core: Small: Fast or Dynamic Websites? Eliminating the Need to Choose

为了支持不断发展的互联网服务（如社交网络、医疗保健和教育），网页越来越多地嵌入大量动态和个性化内容。然而，这样做会使之前确保低延迟页面加载的常规建议变得不足，例如，专注于静态内容的内容交付网络和缓存。因此，今天的开发人员面临着在提供丰富的动态内容和确保用户期望的快速页面加载之间进行权衡的挑战，这两者都会极大地影响用户体验。建议工作的目标是在不牺牲页面正确性或端到端安全性的情况下，从整体上重新考虑如何执行页面加载，以解决这种紧张关系。所建议的工作的关键见解是避免对页面加载的客户端或服务器端孤立的动态内容进行优化，而是追求在两个位置协同操作的优化。该项目涉及该方法的三个应用程序，它们共同解决了整个页面加载过程中与动态内容相关的延迟。首先，它开发了新的页面模板策略，以掩盖在页面加载（例如HTML）开始时动态内容获取的阻塞延迟。其次，它引入了一套新技术，通过高效且保持状态的并行性和计算重用来加速JavaScript代码的执行——这是加载内动态的主要来源。第三，它开发了新的页面服务架构，可以有效地生成接近客户端的动态内容，并最大限度地利用客户端的浏览器缓存。拟议的研究旨在使提供高性能的最先进网页的能力民主化，从而针对开发人员生态系统的广泛部分。特别是，今天的小型内容提供商缺乏昂贵的基础设施，而他们的大型同行利用这些基础设施来提供低延迟的动态内容；结果便是牺牲了性能或功能，这两者都是一场关于用户获取和留存率的艰苦战斗。所建议的系统可以使用现有的web基础设施实现高性能（但负担得起）的动态内容。该项目还涉及到外展工作，以吸引目前在计算机科学领域代表性不足的学生。这些努力的关键是网络的相关性，它消除了术语障碍，让学生开发与他们日常使用的服务相似的服务，增加了兴趣。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

To support evolving Internet services such as social networking, healthcare, and education, web pages increasingly embed large amounts of dynamic and personalized content. However, doing so renders previously routine recommendations for ensuring low-latency page loads insufficient, e.g., content delivery networks and caches that focus on static content. As a result, developers today face a challenging trade-off between serving rich, dynamic content and ensuring the fast page loads that their users expect, both of which greatly affect user experience. The goal of the proposed work is to holistically rethink how page loads are executed in order to address this tension, without sacrificing page correctness or end-to-end security.The key insight underlying the proposed work is to eschew optimizations for dynamic content that are siloed at either the client- or server-end of page loads, and instead pursue optimizations that synergize operations at both locations. The project involves three applications of this approach that collectively address the delays associated with dynamic content throughout the page load process. First, it develops novel page template strategies to mask the blocking delays for dynamic content fetches at the start of page loads (e.g., HTML). Second, it introduces a suite of new techniques for accelerating the execution of JavaScript code -- the primary source of intra-load dynamism -- via efficient and state-preserving parallelism and computation reuse. Third, it develops new page serving architectures that efficiently generate dynamic content close to clients and maximize utility of the client’s browser cache.The proposed research aims to democratize the ability to serve state-of-the-art web pages with high performance, thereby targeting a wide slice of the developer ecosystem. In particular, small content providers today lack the expensive infrastructure that their larger counterparts leverage to serve dynamic content with low latency; the result is a sacrifice of either performance or functionality, both of which present an uphill battle in user acquisition and retention. The proposed systems can enable performant (but affordable) dynamic content using existing web infrastructure. The project also involves outreach efforts to attract students from populations currently under-represented in Computer Science. Key to these efforts is the relatability of the web, which eliminates the terminology barrier and lets students develop services similar to those that they use daily, increasing interest.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.