Making browsers faster: Resource Packages

Re:Making browsers faster: Resource Packages by jerf on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @12:51AM (#946036)

Seems like a better idea would be to just have the server aggressively shove resources down the wire much like standard HTTP pipelining, except where the server doesn't wait for the client to request them. Have the client send a flag up saying it's willing to accept this in the initial request. You get much the same effect, only without adding ZIP files to the mix.

You also get the ability to have proper headers on each element; this solves every "Additional Note" they mention. Some obvious extensions involve things like sending up all the E-Tags the client knows about in the first request. I think it's a lot simpler than their approach and retains more of HTTP. Yeah, it's slightly less bandwidth efficient (though to make the difference large you need pathological examples), but I think it's worth it.

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Re:Making browsers faster: Resource Packages by djcapelis on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @04:22AM (#946167)

The naive implementation of this ruins all the elegance of caching which is very important in modern websites. You end up choosing between getting all the common elements shoved down the wire at you every time or invariably having to go back for the few images unique to the page that you missed.

We're in the middle of a research projects right now where the server automatically constructs cache groups and does this properly. It was one of the things the guys working on spdy and us talked about, but they are taking a slightly different approach.

We'll see what happens, but this is the direction we want to move as well.

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Re:Making browsers faster: Resource Packages by jerf on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @11:10AM (#946638)

In my model, the webserver knows what the "extra few images" are and could send them to you as part of the first burst. First-order caching (no proxying, just server and client) can be handled by having the client also smart enough to send up all the caching info at once.

How to handle proxy caches cleanly isn't immediately obvious to me, but there's far more tools with this approach than the zip file approach. Certainly with work I think it could be solved. Again, to a first order, the proxy would have to accept this style too and do something intelligent with it; an old-style proxy would fall back on the current system.

It is not clear to me: Are you the one proposing this zip file thing, or someone in another group that is working on this? If the latter, I wouldn't mind seeing a link, perhaps even submitted to HN.

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Re:Making browsers faster: Resource Packages by djcapelis on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:18PM (#947154)

I'm in a completely separate group in a completely separate place who happens to have seen this link before. We haven't done anything worth linking to yet, just have a little bit of knowledge about this area since we've been looking at it as well.

What you're saying is close to what we've been looking at trying to turn into code. I think the proxy thing is a non-issue. In fact a proxy in many ways could implement a portion of the server-side smartness and accelerate conforming clients on websites that don't implement this.

These are some larger issues though, I think:

1) Making the server smart enough to actually do this.

2) Sending the resources in the right order (It turns out the order things go down the line can be significant and this is something that can vary depending on which web rendering engine your user has.)

3) This requires changes to HTTP, unlike the linked proposal, so one needs a way to do it right and a compact representation of the cache information.

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