Hans Kruse, Mark Allman, Paul Mallasch. Network and User-Perceived Performance of Web Page Retrievals. November, 1998. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Telecommunications and Electronic Commerce (ICTEC).
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Abstract:

The development of the HTTP protocol has been driven by the need to improve the network performance of the protocol by allowing the efficient retrieval of multiple parts of a web page without the need for multiple simultaneous TCP connections between a client and a server. We suggest that the retrieval of multiple page elements sequentially over a single TCP connection may result in a degradation of the perceived performance experienced by the user.

We attempt to quantify this perceived degradation through the use of a model which combines a web retrieval simulation and an analytical model of TCP operation. Starting with the current HTTP/1.1 specification, we first suggest a client-side heuristic to improve the perceived transfer performance. We show that the perceived speed of the page retrieval can be increased without sacrificing data transfer efficiency. We then propose a new client/server extension to the HTTP/1.1 protocol to allow for the interleaving of page element retrievals. We finally address the issue of the display of advertisements on web pages, and in particular suggest a number of mechanisms which can make efficient use of IP multicast to send advertisements to a number of clients within the same network.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{KAM98,
    author    =        "Hans Kruse and Mark Allman and Paul Mallasch",
    title     =        "{Network and User-Perceived Performance of Web Page Retrievals}",
    booktitle =        "Proceedings of the First International Conference on Telecommunications and Electronic Commerce (ICTEC)",
    year      =        1998,
    month     =        nov,
}