Web View: A Measurement Platform for Depicting Web Browsing Performance and Delivery

TL;DR

Web View is a comprehensive measurement platform that automates web browsing tests to evaluate and visualize the impact of various factors like protocols, CDNs, and browsers on web performance over time.

Contribution

It introduces Web View, a novel platform for holistic web browsing performance measurement and visualization, considering the entire delivery chain.

Findings

CDN usage can reduce loading times by up to 400%.

Different transport protocols can decrease loading times by up to 79%.

Web View provides insights into web performance evolutions over a year.

Abstract

Web browsing is the main Internet Service and every customer wants the minimum web page loading times. To satisfy this perpetual need, web browsers offer new processing engines and increased functionalities. Web developers make use of new programming languages and paradigms, new transport protocols have been introduced, network operators offer increased bandwidth and Content Delivery Networks (CDN) providers deploy web servers closest to end-users. To assess the efficiency of these evolutions, delivered performance is often evaluated into a standalone manner, without considering the whole chain of web browsing. We propose Web View, a measurement platform, which performs automated web browsing sessions on popular websites in a user-representative environment. Through different configurable parameters, Web View measures a wide set of information in order to evaluate the impact of the different parameters (transport protocols, web browsers, CDN, access networks, etc.). Based on those measurements, to ease the understanding of web browsing and the corresponding evolutions, Web View offers a public visualization website (https://webview.orange.com). For instance, with Web View, we were able to detect that the use of different CDNs at different times of the day can decrease loading times up to 400% and that the delivery of content through different transport protocols can decrease loading times up to 79%. This paper presents the Web View measurement platform as well as remarkable events we noticed during more than one year of measurements.