Understanding and reducing Web delays

Slow performance costs e-commerce Web sites as much as $4.35 billion annually in lost revenue. Perceived latency-the amount of time between when a user issues a request and receives a response-is a critical issue. Research into improving performance falls into two categories: work on servers and work on networks and protocols. On the server side, previous work has focused on techniques for improving server performance. Such studies show how Web servers behave under a range of loads. These studies often suggest enhancements to application implementations and the operating systems those servers run. On the network side, research has focused on improving network infrastructure performance for Internet applications. Studies focusing on network dynamics have resulted in several enhancements to HTTP, including data compression, persistent connections, and pipelining. These improvements are all part of HTTP 1.1. However, little work has been done on common latency sources that cause the overall delays that frustrate end users. The future of performance improvements lies in developing additional techniques to help implement efficient, scalable, and stable improvements that enhance the end-user experience.