TY - JOUR
T1 - Demystifying the Imperfect Client-Side Cache Performance of Mobile Web Browsing
AU - Liu, Xuanzhe
AU - Ma, Yun
AU - Liu, Yunxin
AU - Xie, Tao
AU - Huang, Gang
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the High-Tech Research and Development Program of China under Grant No.2015AA01A203, the Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61370020, 61421091, 61222203), and the Key Program of Ministry of Education, China under Grant No.313004. Tao Xie's work was supported in part by US National Science Foundation under grants no. CCF-1349666, CCF-1409423, CNS-1434582, CCF-1434590, CCF-1434596, CNS-1439481, and CNS-1513939.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 IEEE.
PY - 2016/9/1
Y1 - 2016/9/1
N2 - The web browser is one of the most significant applications on mobile devices such as smartphones. However, the user experience of mobile web browsing is undesirable because of the slow resource loading. To improve the performance of web resource loading, client-side cache has been adopted as a key mechanism. However, the existing passive measurement studies cannot comprehensively characterize the "client-side" cache performance of mobile web browsing. For example, most of these studies mainly focus on client-side implementations but not server-side configurations, suffer from biased user behaviors, and fail to study "miscached" resources. To address these issues, in this article, we present a proactive approach to making a comprehensive measurement study on client-side cache performance. The key idea of our approach is to proactively crawl resources from hundreds of websites periodically with a fine-grained time interval. Thus, we are able to uncover the resource update history and cache configurations at the server side, and analyze the cache performance in various time granularities. Based on our collected data, we build a new cache analysis model and study the upper bound of how high percentage of resources could potentially be cached and how effectively the caching works in practice. We report detailed analysis results of different websites and various types of web resources, and identify the problems caused by unsatisfactory cache performance. In particular, we identify two major problems - Redundant Transfer and Miscached Resource, which lead to unsatisfactory cache performance. We investigate three main root causes: Same Content, Heuristic Expiration, and Conservative Expiration Time, and discuss what mobile web developers can do to mitigate those problems.
AB - The web browser is one of the most significant applications on mobile devices such as smartphones. However, the user experience of mobile web browsing is undesirable because of the slow resource loading. To improve the performance of web resource loading, client-side cache has been adopted as a key mechanism. However, the existing passive measurement studies cannot comprehensively characterize the "client-side" cache performance of mobile web browsing. For example, most of these studies mainly focus on client-side implementations but not server-side configurations, suffer from biased user behaviors, and fail to study "miscached" resources. To address these issues, in this article, we present a proactive approach to making a comprehensive measurement study on client-side cache performance. The key idea of our approach is to proactively crawl resources from hundreds of websites periodically with a fine-grained time interval. Thus, we are able to uncover the resource update history and cache configurations at the server side, and analyze the cache performance in various time granularities. Based on our collected data, we build a new cache analysis model and study the upper bound of how high percentage of resources could potentially be cached and how effectively the caching works in practice. We report detailed analysis results of different websites and various types of web resources, and identify the problems caused by unsatisfactory cache performance. In particular, we identify two major problems - Redundant Transfer and Miscached Resource, which lead to unsatisfactory cache performance. We investigate three main root causes: Same Content, Heuristic Expiration, and Conservative Expiration Time, and discuss what mobile web developers can do to mitigate those problems.
KW - Mobile web
KW - cache
KW - measurement
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U2 - 10.1109/TMC.2015.2489202
DO - 10.1109/TMC.2015.2489202
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84981288102
VL - 15
SP - 2206
EP - 2220
JO - IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
JF - IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
SN - 1536-1233
IS - 9
M1 - 7295636
ER -