Title
Demystifying the Imperfect Client-Side Cache Performance of Mobile Web Browsing.
Abstract
The web browser is one of the most significant applications on mobile devices such as smartphones. However, the user experience of mobile web browsing is undesirable because of the slow resource loading. To improve the performance of web resource loading, client-side cache has been adopted as a key mechanism. However, the existing passive measurement studies cannot comprehensively characterize the client-side cache performance of mobile web browsing. For example, most of these studies mainly focus on client-side implementations but not server-side configurations, suffer from biased user behaviors, and fail to study miscached resources. To address these issues, in this article, we present a proactive approach to making a comprehensive measurement study on client-side cache performance. The key idea of our approach is to proactively crawl resources from hundreds of websites periodically with a fine-grained time interval. Thus, we are able to uncover the resource update history and cache configurations at the server side, and analyze the cache performance in various time granularities. Based on our collected data, we build a new cache analysis model and study the upper bound of how high percentage of resources could potentially be cached and how effectively the caching works in practice. We report detailed analysis results of different websites and various types of web resources, and identify the problems caused by unsatisfactory cache performance. In particular, we identify two major problems - Redundant Transfer and Miscached Resource, which lead to unsatisfactory cache performance. We investigate three main root causes: Same Content, Heuristic Expiration, and Conservative Expiration Time, and discuss what mobile web developers can do to mitigate those problems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/TMC.2015.2489202
IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput.
Keywords
Field
DocType
Browsers,Mobile communication,Servers,History,Mobile computing,Uniform resource locators,Loading
Cache invalidation,Cache pollution,Cache,Computer science,Computer network,Page cache,Cache algorithms,Web navigation,Cache coloring,Smart Cache,Database
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
15
9
1536-1233
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
10
0.50
22
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xuanzhe Liu168957.53
Yun Ma221620.25
Yunxin Liu369454.18
Tao Xie45978304.97
Gang Huang51223110.80