Using a Proxy to Measure Client-Side Web Performance

摘要

Accurately collecting measurements of client-side browsing behavior and performance is important for making decisions about the design and operation of protocols. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a method for measuring various variables related to the client-side browsing of Web pages. For example, with this method we can measure the contribution of DNS lookups to the total latency for loading a Web page as experienced by the user. We provide a discussion of the criteria that such a method should meet. We then evaluate the effectiveness of our method and discuss its limitations with respect to our design criteria. We consider the scope of questions that can be answered using this method.