Research at MIT: System Loads Web Pages 34 Percent Faster By Fetching Files More Effectively

From MIT:

There are few things more frustrating than a slow-loading Web page. For companies, what’s even worse is what comes after: users abandoning their site in droves. Amazon, for example, estimates that every 100-millisecond delay cuts its profits by 1 percent.
To help combat this problem, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Harvard University have developed a system that decreases page-load times by 34 percent.
Dubbed “Polaris,” the framework determines how to overlap the downloading of a page
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Tech companies like Google and Amazon have also tried to improve load times, with an emphasis on lowering costs for data usage. This means that they often focus on the challenge of more quickly transferring information via data compression. The CSAIL team, meanwhile, has demonstrated that Polaris’ gains on load-time are more consistent and more substantive.

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See Also: Eyebrowse: A Collaborative Web Browsing Tool Under Development at MIT

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