Improve performance of

Ajax Web applications

COMP6008: Research Methods in Computing

Stephan Scheuermann, 23753021

7 December 2009
Overview
• Background information
– Ajax Web applications
– Ajax Example
• Improve Ajax performance
– Prefetch data
– Prediction algorithm
– Implementation
• Summary

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Background information
• Traditional Web applications
– Completely run on a Web server (PHP, ASP.NET etc.)
– Most user actions trigger an HTTP request
– Browser only displays processed HTML

3
Background information
• Ajax web applications use well known techniques
– JavaScript, XML, HTML, DOM
• A great deal of interaction is shifted to the browser
– Only required data is requested asynchronously
– Ajax framework updates HTML DOM
• Dramatically reduced bandwidth usage and response time

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Background information
• Example: Sending a message on facebook

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Improve Ajax performance
• Prefetch data
• Required data is downloaded before it is needed

• Fetched data is stored in the browser cache

• Algorithm to predict the behaviour of the user decides
which data has to be downloaded

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Improve Ajax performance
• Prediction algorithm relies on the analysis of user behaviour
– User profile
e.g., after each login the message center is opened
– Current activity
e.g., user is hovering the mouse pointer over a button

• Prediction could be improved if several criteria are combined with each

other

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Improve Ajax performance
• Implementation
– Two versions (with/without prefetching) are compared
– Prediction only takes user’s current action into account
– Data is fetched asynchronously when selecting an item
in a drop-down list or hovering the mouse over links
– Test results prove response time is improved by 64,5%!

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Summary
• Average response time is notably improved
– Good prediction algorithms are important
• Additional resources (JavaScript libraries) are required and
have to be downloaded while loading the website
• Prefetching could increase bandwidth usage
– Some resources are downloaded but never used

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Sources
• Andi Ahmad Dahlan & Toshikazu Nishimura,
Implementation of asynchronous predictive fetch to
improve the performance of Ajax-enabled web
applications,
International Conference on Information Integration and
web-based Applications and Services (iiWAS 2008)

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 Many thanks!
Any questions?
BACKUP
Measured delay time
Duration to click after hovering an item
Very fast Fast Normal
(msec) (msec) (msec)
Textual link 125-500 250-850 >850

Button 125-250 250-750 >850

Drop-down list 350-450 450-1000 >1000

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