Paper-Conference

Crawling the web at scale forms the basis of many important systems: web search engines, smart assistants, generative AI, web archives, and so on. Yet, the research community has paid little attention to this workload in the last decade.

It is common for the authors of a web page to include links to related pages on other sites. However, when users visit a page several years after it was last updated, they often find that some of the external links either do not work or point to unrelated content.

It is common for the authors of a web page to include links to related pages on other sites. However, when users visit a page several years after it was last updated, they often find that some of the external links either do not work or point to unrelated content.

Web pages today commonly include large amounts of JavaScript code in order to offer users a dynamic experience. These scripts often make pages slow to load, partly due to a fundamental inefficiency in how browsers process JavaScript content: browsers make it easy for web developers to reason about page state by serially executing all scripts on any frame in a page, but as a result, fail to leverage the multiple CPU cores that are readily available even on low-end phones.

Mobile web browsing remains slow despite many efforts to accelerate page loads. Like others, we find that client-side computation (in particular, JavaScript execution) is a key culprit. Prior solutions to mitigate computation overheads, however, suffer from security, privacy, and deployability issues, hindering their adoption.

By replicating data across sites in multiple geographic regions, web services can maximize availability and minimize latency for their users. However, when sacrificing data consistency is not an option, we show that service providers have to today incur significantly higher cost to meet desired latency goals than the lowest cost theoretically feasible.

Like any other distributed system, cloud management stacks such as OpenStack, are susceptible to faults whose root cause is often hard to diagnose and may take hours or days to fix.

Software evolution in third-party libraries across version upgrades can result in addition of new functionalities or change in existing APIs. As a result, there is a real danger of impairment of backward compatibility.