SWAROVsky: Optimizing Resource Loading for Mobile Web Browsing

TL;DR: The SWAROVsky system is designed and implemented to address three main issues of current inefficient Web resource loading: on-demand and thus slow loading of sub-resources of webpages; duplicated loading of resources with different URLs but the same content; and redundant loading of the same resource due to improper cache configurations.

Abstract: Imperfect Web resource loading prevents mobile Web browsing from providing satisfactory user experience. In this article, we design and implement the SWAROVsky system to address three main issues of current inefficient Web resource loading: (1) on-demand and thus slow loading of sub-resources of webpages ; (2) duplicated loading of resources with different URLs but the same content ; and (3) redundant loading of the same resource due to improper cache configurations . SWAROVsky employs a dual-proxy architecture that comprises a remote cloud-side proxy and a local proxy on mobile devices. The remote proxy proactively loads webpages from their original Web servers and maintains a resource loading graph for every single webpage. Based on the graph, the remote proxy is capable of deciding which resources are “really” needed for the webpage and their loading orders, and thus can synchronize these needed resources with the local proxy of a client efficiently and timely. The local proxy also runs an intelligent and light-weight algorithm to identify resources with different URLs but the same content, and thus can avoid duplicated downloading of the same content via network. Our system can be used with existing Web browsers and Web servers, and does not break the normal semantics of a webpage. Evaluations with 50 websites show that on average our system can reduce the page load time by 43.1 percent and the network data transmission by 57.6 percent, while imposing marginal system overhead.