Rethinking Client-Side Caching for the Mobile Web

Published:

Ayush Goel, Vaspol Ruamviboonsuk, Ravi Netravali, Harsha V. Madhyastha. 22nd International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications. HotMobile 2021

Abstract

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.

To sidestep these issues, we propose a browser-based solution in which every client reuses identical computations from its prior page loads. Our analysis across roughly 230 pages reveals that, even on a modern smartphone, such an approach could reduce client-side computation by a median of 49% on pages which are most in need of such optimizations.