[webkit-dev] Making browsers faster: Resource Packages

[Mike Belshe]

Overall, I think the general idea.

I'm concerned about the head-of-line blocking that it introduces.  If an
administrator poorly constructs the bundle, he could significantly hurt
perf.  Instead of using gzip, you could use a framer which chunked items
before gzipping.  This might be more trouble than it is worth.

Inside the browser, the caching is going to be kind of annoying.  Example:
 Say foo.zip contains foo.gif and baz.gif, and foo.zip expires in one week.
  When the browser downloads the manifest, it needs to "unfold it" and store
foo.gif and baz.gif in the cache.  Then, a week later, if the browser tries
to use foo.gif, it will be expired; does the browser fetch foo.zip?  or just
foo.gif?  Obviously, either will "work".  But now you've got an inconsistent
cache.  If you hit another page which references foo.zip next, you'll
download the whole zip file when all you needed was bar.gif.  This is
probably a minor problem - I can't see this being very significant in
practice.  Did you consider having the resources for a bundle be addressed
such as:  http://www.foo.com/bundle.zip/foo.gif  ?  This would eliminate the
problem of two names for the same resource.  Maybe this was your intent -
the spec was unclear about the identity (URL) of the bundled resources.

I think it is a good enough idea to warrant an implementation.  Once we have
data about performance, it will be clear whether this should be made
official or not.

Mike


On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Alexander Limi <limi at mozilla.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 5:56 PM, Alexander Limi <limi at mozilla.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 5:53 PM, James Robinson <jamesr at google.com>wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, actual numbers would be nice to have.
>>
>>
>> Steve Souders just emailed me some preliminary numbers from a bunch of
>> major web sites, so that should be on his blog shortly.
>>
>
> Numbers are up:
>
> http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/11/18/fewer-requests-through-resource-packages/
>
>
> --
> Alexander Limi · Firefox User Experience · http://limi.net
>
>
>
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