MIT’s Polaris makes fast work of loading web pages
10 Mar 2016
Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Harvard University have devised a way to lower the amount of waiting time where a web page loads through a streamlined file retrieval process.
The technique called Polaris, loads individual objects making up a web page in a more efficient manner. In other words, Polaris would be able to map out a more direct route for the browser to travel between such individual objects in a web page.
MIT PhD student Ravi Netravali explained, ''It can take up to 100 milliseconds each time a browser has to cross a mobile network to fetch a piece of data,'' ubergizmo.com reported.
Hence, if a web page was particularly complex, then the browser would need to make far more trips across the network. Polaris' works to lower the number of such trips, and it takes the data compression route of doing so. Polaris had so far been used to test out a wide range of network conditions on 200 leading websites in the world, ESPN.com, NYTimes.com and Weather.com included, and the conclusion was, that it worked better with large, complex sites in addition to mobile networks.
Polaris is capable of decreasing load times by 34 per cent by overlapping the downloading of a page's objects so the whole page loaded faster.
Harvard professor James Mickens describes how Polaris works to speed up web page loading, using the analogy of a traveling salesperson, ''When you visit one city, you sometimes discover more cities you have to visit before going home. If someone gave you the entire list of cities ahead of time, you could plan the fastest possible route. Without the list, though, you have to discover new cities as you go, which results in unnecessary zig-zagging between far-away cities.''
''For a web browser, loading all of a page's objects is like visiting all of the cities,'' says Mickens. ''Polaris effectively gives you a list of all the cities before your trip actually begins. It's what allows the browser to load a webpage more quickly.''
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