Client Performance

Abstract

The process of displaying a web page involves distributed computing. A browser on the client PC requests and parses the HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, and other objects on a page, while one or more servers generate and deliver dynamic and static content. Building a fast system, therefore, requires both the browser and the server to be fast, as well as the network and other components in between. One way to think about it is that the server is really sending one or more programs to the browser in the form of HTML (which is after all, Hypertext Markup Language) and JavaScript. The browser then has to parse and execute those programs and render the results to the screen.