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MIT enters the race to speed up website load times

by: Nancy Yoshihara |

How many of us have tapped our fingers impatiently waiting for a website to open? The wait time apparently is problematic enough for MIT to work on shortening load times. 

Its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Harvard University have developed Polaris, a system that reduces page-load times by 34%. How it does so is very techy and less important to know than why website load times matter so much.

“It can take up to 100 milliseconds each time a browser has to cross a mobile network to fetch a piece of data,” says PhD student Ravi Netravali, who is first author on a paper about Polaris that he will present at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. “As pages increase in complexity, they often require multiple trips that create delays that really add up.” 

The delay is worrisome for companies because impatient viewers will bolt to another website. For publishers, finicky users abandoning their sites is bad news.

“In fact, data shows that people abandon websites after just three seconds if the content doesn't load quickly—which is bad not just for people trying to get what they want online, but for the publishers who want those readers to enjoy the content they've created for them,” Google said two weeks ago in announcing the expansion of it Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, an open source initiative to make the mobile web as fast as possible.

The MIT and Harvard researchers evaluated their Polaris system across a range of network conditions on 200 of the world’s most popular websites, including ESPN.com, NYTimes.com (The New York Times), and Weather.com.

Researchers are working on a process for public release of Polaris.

Nancy Yoshihara

Nancy Yoshihara is content manager at KDMC and its website with a focus on News for Digital Innovators and Tools, Tips
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