Web Log: MIT research to super charge webpage load times

Slow-loading web pages are not merely frustrating; they are bad for business. Amazon estimates that every 100-millisecond delay in load time cuts its profits by 1 per cent. Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have come up with a system, known as Polaris, that can speed up load times by up to 34 per cent.

Ravi Netravali, a researcher working on Polaris, explains: "As pages increase in complexity, they often require multiple trips that create delays that really add up. Our approach minimizes the number of round trips so that we can substantially speed up a page's load time."

When your browser fetches a website, it has to load all the various objects on that site, and these objects are connected to each other. Normally, what happens is it fetches them in a treasure hunt-like manner, first you get one object that leads you to the next and so on. Polaris can be likened to a map revealing all the treasure hunt locations so that you can figure out the most efficient route between them.

http://news.mit.edu/2016/system-loads-web%20pages-34-percent-faster-0309