Investigating the Evolvability of Web Page Load Time
Abstract
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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1803.01683,
title = {Investigating the Evolvability of Web Page Load Time},
author = {Brendan Cody-Kenny and Umberto Manganiello and John Farrelly and Adrian Ronayne and Eoghan Considine and Thomas McGuire and Michael O'Neill},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.01683},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
8 Pages, to appear in EvoSET 2018