MIT gets hit again! The problem with slow pages is known from the beginning of the Internet. Too many companies, researchers and developers have dealt with its solution but no one has ever managed to announce a 34% success rate, reducing the total page load time. Until today.
A team of researchers from the Department of Computer Science and Artificial market Lab (CSAIL) of MIT achieved impressive results.
The MIT team, including also a Harvard professor, has created the Polaris algorithm, which focuses on determining the right time to launch network requests to Web resources or Web resources.
The websites work in a very simple way. To access a web page, one types a URL into their browser. A DNS server redirects it to the IP address where you host the website and program browsing starts downloading the files (Web resources) stored on the server, let's say an HTML page.
Within this HTML page, there is the source code of the web page that loads different resources in CSS format, JS files, images, Flash content, and other information. Each resource of these means a separate request, which (applications) makes the user's browser.
As previous studies have shown, the problem of slow page loading is not always due to low bandwidth, but also to the time required to send all network requests, the size of the files being downloaded, and the delays of the networkU.
How does the Polaris algorithm work?
To address these issues, MIT's Polaris framework will work by creating dependency graphs for each page on the Web, which will dictate a more efficient order in which all the resources of a page should be loaded.
Graphics are widely used today in software development, and are at the heart of some software development tools.
In fact, the Polaris framework works first as it records how the loads of a web page interact with each other. It then creates a dependency graph for each WEP page, and sends the requests in such a way that only the necessary content is loaded first.
MIT has tested Polaris in 200 different network conditions and found that load times decreased by an average of 34%. The best results were achieved on larger websites that contained many JS files.
The researchers will present the Polaris framework at the USENIX Symposium to be held this week at Networked Systems Design and Implementation.