Investigating the Evolvability of Web Page Load Time
This addresses performance issues for web developers and users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing optimization techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of optimizing web page load time by applying a mutate-and-test approach to JavaScript code, achieving a 41% improvement in load time for a benchmark web page.
Client-side Javascript execution environments (browsers) allow anonymous functions and event-based programming concepts such as callbacks. We investigate whether a mutate-and-test approach can be used to optimise web page load time in these environments. First, we characterise a web page load issue in a benchmark web page and derive performance metrics from page load event traces. We parse Javascript source code to an AST and make changes to method calls which appear in a web page load event trace. We present an operator based solely on code deletion and evaluate an existing "community-contributed" performance optimising code transform. By exploring Javascript code changes and exploiting combinations of non-destructive changes, we can optimise page load time by 41% in our benchmark web page.