Web performance acceleration by caching rendering results

Abstract

Web performance, the time from clicking a link on a web page to finishing displaying the web page of the link, is becoming increasingly important. Low web performance of web pages tends to result in the loss of customers. In our research, we measured the time for downloading files on popular web pages by running web browsers on four hosts worldwide using PlanetLab and detected the longest portion in download time. We found the longest portion in download time to be Blocked time, which is the waiting time for the start of downloading in web browsers. In this paper, we propose a method for accelerating web performance by reducing such Blocked time with a cache of rendering results. The proposed method uses an in-network rendering function which renders web pages instead of web browsers. The in-network rendering function also stores the rendering results in its cache and reuses them for other web browsers to reduce the Blocked time. To evaluate the proposed method, we calculated the web performance of web pages whose render results are cached by analyzing the measured download time of actual web pages. We found that the proposed method accelerates web performance of long round trip time (RTT) web pages or long RTT clients if the web pages' dynamic file percentages are within 80%.