System loads Web pages 34 percent faster

There are few things more frustrating than a slow-loading Web page. For companies, what’s even worse is what comes after: users abandoning their site in droves. Amazon, for example, estimates that every 100-millisecond delay cuts its profits by 1 percent.

To help combat this problem, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Harvard University have developed a system that decreases page-load times by 34 percent. Dubbed “Polaris,” the framework determines how to overlap the downloading of a page’s objects, such that the overall page requires less time to load.

“It can take up to 100 milliseconds each time a browser has to cross a mobile network to fetch a piece of data,” says PhD student Ravi Netravali, who is first author on a paper about Polaris that he will present at this week’s USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. “As pages increase in complexity, they often require multiple trips that create delays that really add up. Our approach minimizes the number of round trips so that we can substantially speed up a page’s load-time.”

The paper’s co-authors include graduate student Ameesh Goyal and professor Hari Balakrishnan, as well as Harvard professor James Mickens, who started working on the project during his stint as a visiting professor at MIT in 2014. The researchers evaluated their system across a range of network conditions on 200 of the world’s most popular websites, including ESPN.com, NYTimes.com (The New York Times), and Weather.com.

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